


Imaginary Friends

by adorkablephil (kimberly_a)



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, But Not Really Imaginary, But Not Your Typical Soulmates AU, Dreams, Dreamsharing, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Imaginary Friends, It's Really Hard to Tag This Thing, M/M, Magic, Magic Revealed, Pining, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmates, TATINOF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-01-16 20:51:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 29,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12350436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimberly_a/pseuds/adorkablephil
Summary: Nothing’s AU … except that Dan and Phil have been appearing in each other’s dreams since childhood without realizing it because they’re soulmates. Everything on the outside looks like the reality we’re used to irl.





	1. The Shadow Boy

**Author's Note:**

> Months ago, a Tumblr anon requested that I write “a soulmates AU.” I’ve never read any soulmate AUs, but the prompt got me thinking … so this is sort of an AU, and it’s sort of about soulmates, but it’s not what most people would probably call “a soulmates AU,” because it’s my own weird take on the concept. It jumps around in time, and also between waking and dreaming, but I hope things will be clear.
> 
> I've written the first 4 chapters already and will probably be updating twice a week. The first 4 chapters thus far have only gone up to a Teen rating, but ... this could end up moving as high as Mature.

Phil woke slowly, his brain still fogged by sleep, still half in the dream with the shadow.

He used to call his recurring dream friend “the shadow boy,” but that had been long ago, back when it had all started, back when he’d been only a boy himself. Now he just thought of his dream friend as “the shadow.” And this was the first shadow dream he’d had in a few months, so he found himself reluctant to wake, wanting to cling to those last lingering moments of the dream that were quickly fading away. The shadow dreams were always his favorites.

He pulled the duvet up to his chin and snuggled into it, thinking back on what he could remember of the dream. The shadow had seemed sad, Phil thought, and he wondered what that meant about his own psyche. Why would his subconscious make his shadow friend sad tonight, when Phil himself had gone to bed fairly happy? Why had he dreamt about the shadow at all, instead of dreaming about the cute girl who’d been flirting with him at Louise’s party last night?

Strangely, it wasn’t the girl’s face he imagined as he closed his eyes and pressed his head into the pillow, wrapping the duvet more tightly around himself against the morning chill. Instead, he imagined the familiar presence of his dream friend, and he wished he could comfort the shadow. He hoped that in the dream he had, at least a little bit.

By the time he shuffled toward the kitchen in search of a bowl of cereal, he’d left imaginary childhood friends behind in the quiet corners of his mind and the warm folds of the bedclothes. Dan looked up from the sofa, laptop on his lap, dark circles under his eyes.

“Did you go to bed at all?” Phil asked with a worried, knowing sigh.

Dan shrugged. “I slept a couple hours, I think.”

Phil sat on the arm of the sofa in his pajamas and rested a hand on Dan’s shoulder, making him look up. “We don’t have anything we really have to do today, so maybe you can catch a nap or something.”

Dan nodded absently, turning back to his laptop screen, and Phil went in search of breakfast, trying not to worry about his brooding flatmate. He wondered if maybe some Miyazaki might cheer Dan up a bit. They hadn’t watched Totoro in a while. The thought of Totoro’s magical forest made him think of the shadow again, just a hint of a whisper of a thought, but then it flickered away under the bright lights of the kitchen, and the real world intruded again, and his shadow was gone.

* * *

Phil couldn’t remember when the shadow boy first appeared in his dreams. It sort of seemed like he’d always been there, but the first time Phil remembered telling his mum about it was when he was in Year 3, so he must have been about 7 then.

The boy wasn’t a real shadow, of course—that’s just what Phil called him, because he didn’t have a real name. He didn’t always look the same, either, but Phil could always recognize him anyway. Sometimes he looked just like Phil, like looking in a mirror and seeing his own school uniform and his own pale face grinning back at him with the same freckles and everything. Other times, the shadow boy looked like a squirrel running through a forest, and Phil chased him until the shadow boy ran up a tree and laughed at him as Phil jumped and jumped but couldn’t reach him up there until he decided to grow claws and climb up the trunk and the shadow boy squirrel would change into a butterfly and fly away, laughing at him even more.

Sometimes, he was just a speck of light, swirling around Phil’s head or leading him off to show him beautiful things, like the time Phil followed him to an entire field of cornflowers, and he lay flat on the ground and gazed up at the sky, and the shadow boy had transformed from the speck of light into a bright orange fox and had curled up by Phil’s side among the blue flowers and had lay there with him for ages, watching him with warm brown eyes and letting Phil stroke his soft fur.

Phil didn’t always look like himself in the dreams, either—he could look however he wanted. Sometimes he made himself into a bird covered in a whole rainbow of feathers, or even a  **boy**  covered in a rainbow of feathers! He could do anything he wanted, but he just usually preferred to look like himself, because then he wouldn’t get lost. He would always be able to find himself again.

The shadow boy didn’t seem to be afraid of getting lost. When Phil asked him why, the shadow boy said it was because he knew  **Phil**  would always find him.

The shadow boy didn’t call him “Phil” in the dreams, though, just like Phil didn’t know the shadow boy’s name. They didn’t need names in the dreams, because they just  **knew**  each other, knew each other’s souls or hearts or something. They knew each other better than words or names can express, in that way you just sometimes  **know**  things in dreams. Phil was just “me,” and the shadow boy was just “you,” and they were just “us” … and it didn’t have to be more complicated than that. No matter what they looked like, no matter what they were called, it was still  **them** , and nobody knew Phil as well as the shadow boy did.

Sometimes he wished the shadow boy was real. He even pretended sometimes, talking to his own shadow on the playground, pretending that it was the boy from his dreams, but he was old enough to know it was all just his own imagination. He understood about dreams, that they weren’t real. And he understood also, even in Year 3, that nobody would ever know him as well as the shadow boy did. He’d never feel that connected to anyone else. Not in the real world. Only in his dreams.

And that’s why the shadow dreams were always his favorites.


	2. Godzillas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dan has sexy ankles

One day Phil had come home from school with a scraped knee and elbow, and his mum had asked him what happened. He told her he’d tripped, and she’d believed him because he was always so clumsy, but really some older boys had pushed him down on the pavement outside the school. They had pointed at him on the ground and laughed, saying that he couldn’t even walk like a normal person, always falling over his own feet.

So it sort of hurt that his mum believed him when he gave that excuse. He didn’t blame her, though.

That night the shadow boy came into his dreams in the shape of a tiny mouse, soft and white and delicate, with a pink nose and tiny little ears. Phil picked up the shadow mouse in his dream hands and noticed that they were larger than usual, like his dad’s hands, like a grown-up’s hands. He looked down at himself and saw that he was much bigger than usual, and that hadn’t happened before. Always before, if he changed in the dream it was because he did it on purpose. This time, it just happened.

“What’s happening?” he asked the shadow boy mouse. He didn’t feel afraid, just confused.

“I’m making you look like I see you,” the mouse squeaked from where he was cradled safely in Phil’s cupped hands. “You make me feel safe, like a giant.”

Phil carefully stroked the top of the mouse’s head with one overgrown finger. “Being a giant makes  **me**  feel safe,” he confided. “Now nobody can hurt me.”

“We’ll keep each other safe,” the shadow mouse told him, and then he began to grow and change, so Phil set him on the ground. Soon, the shadow boy was a giant like Phil, and they grew taller and taller until they were like Godzilla, and they rampaged across a futuristic neon dream city, stomping on cars and buildings and roaring and laughing together.

When he woke up, Phil hoped nobody had been inside any of those cars or buildings, because he didn’t want to actually  **hurt**  anybody. But then he remembered that it was all just a dream, and none of it was real, not even the shadow boy. That last bit made him a little sad, but he still remembered how safe he’d felt, how powerful, and how it had felt to stomp alongside the shadow boy like they owned the world … and then, even though he knew it hadn’t been real, he still felt better.

He set his mouth in a determined line and prepared to face the boys at school. Maybe if he still felt like Godzilla on the inside, they would know not to mess with him. He clung to his memory of the shadow boy as he put on his uniform for the day.

* * *

At the Brits in 2016, someone had built a miniature model of London, and the photographers urged Dan and Phil to pretend to stomp through it like giants bent on destruction, and together they had laughed and laughed.

Pretending to be Godzilla alongside his best friend in the world, Phil felt a glimmer of a memory of something very old … something he couldn’t quite grasp or remember fully. It shimmered in the furthest recesses of his mind, then was gone, banished by all the flashbulbs going off around them, the celebrities on the nearby red carpet, the interviews they needed to prepare for.

But as they pretended to stomp through that mini-London, Phil paused to enjoy the moment, and he just looked at Dan, gleefully roaring beside him, and smiled. And Dan grinned back at him. And that moment was perfect.

* * *

Back at the flat afterward, they collapsed on the sofa in a post-adrenaline crash … but not an unhappy one. The night had gone well. With the tour coming up, their future with the BBC was uncertain, but even if this was their last time presenting the YouTube livestream of the awards, they’d gone out in style.

Dan, especially. Phil glanced at the bare ankles visible between the hem of Dan’s fashionably cropped trousers and the white shoes he had propped up beside Phil on the sofa.

Phil had felt rather drab beside his friend tonight, with Dan’s eye-catching suit jacket and model-perfect handsomeness and composure. Phil himself had chosen a comparatively sedate dark ensemble, in something of a reversal of roles, since he was usually the more colorful one in their everyday lives. But Dan was meant for all this flashy fashion stuff and didn’t mind standing out, transforming himself at will into some kind of glamorous near-stranger when situations called for it. Phil didn’t have the ability to put on a different face like that. Even out there on the red carpets, he was still just the same Phil Lester who’d be more comfortable in an Adventure Time hoody and a pair of Star Wars pajamas, and he knew it showed.

Tonight had been fun, probably mostly because he’d been with Dan, but he was glad to be home.

Dan sighed from the other end of the sofa, and Phil asked, “Tired?” Dan just grunted in a way that, after all these years, Phil could read as a definite yes. He levered himself to his feet with some effort and looked down at his beautiful flatmate, sprawled like a drunken starfish and apparently half-asleep already. “You can’t sleep there, Dan,” he insisted, but Dan just mumbled and started to turn onto his side. Phil rolled his eyes.

“Okay, Danny boy. Time to get you to bed.” Phil manhandled Dan into a rather precariously tilted sitting position, receiving no help at all from the limp flatmate in question. Phil wrapped his arms around Dan in a sort of odd embrace and hefted him to his feet, then looped Dan’s arm over his shoulders and started laboriously walking him down the hall toward his bedroom. Finally, he tossed Dan onto his bed, but then realized he couldn’t let him sleep like that. He needed to at least get him under the duvet.

He knelt down beside the bed and unlaced Dan’s shoes, fingers grazing those delicate bare ankles which he knew shouldn’t affect him like this. Dan was his flatmate. A man shouldn’t be hypnotized by his platonic flatmate’s ankles.

Tossing the shoes aside, Phil maneuvered a mostly comatose Dan at least partly under the duvet and finally decided that was going to have to be good enough. Those slim trousers didn’t look comfortable for sleeping … but at that thought Phil decided it was a good time to leave the room.

* * *

That night, Phil dreamt a shadow dream, but for once he couldn’t remember much about it when he woke. The only sensation that lingered was the warm press of the shadow’s lips against his. The shadow had kissed him, or he had kissed the shadow, or they had kissed each other. He’d never dreamt that before.

He blamed Dan’s sexy ankles from the previous night. They’d obviously put him in a mood that his subconscious had run with.

Even though he knew the shadow in his dreams wasn’t real, he still found himself afraid that he’d somehow messed things up, that maybe the shadow wouldn’t come back now. Maybe he would never have a shadow dream again.

He didn’t want to lose the shadow boy who’d always been there for him.

What had he done?


	3. Shadow and Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was just a kiss, right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought I should post this before the phandom goes absolutely bonkers tomorrow.

For weeks after the shadow kiss dream, Phil found himself oddly panicked, as if he’d done something horribly wrong and disaster must surely follow.

He felt like he’d betrayed the trust of his closest friend since childhood … even though it was a person who only existed inside his own imagination.

He sat on the couch beside Dan, each of them staring at their laptop screens, and he remembered those bare ankles on the night after the Brits. How he had stared down at Dan’s beautiful sleepy face and wished … wished that things could be different.

Dan had been seemed a little withdrawn lately, but when Phil asked about it he just said he’d been having trouble sleeping. It was like he went into his own world sometimes, just retreating into his own mind and not sharing with anyone else. Phil knew it probably had nothing to do with him.

Except … was it possible that Phil had given something away? Somehow betrayed the longing he’d tried so hard to keep hidden? Surely not. This probably had nothing to do with him.

But that longing was probably why he had done what he’d done later that night in his dream.  **Whatever**  it was that he’d done, since he couldn’t actually remember very well. He’d been thinking of Dan, of these inconvenient feelings that had seemed to become even more insistent lately, and so he’d turned an innocent shadow dream into … something else.

* * *

He wished he could remember what he had done.

He wished the shadow would come back, but a couple weeks went by with no shadow dreams. Phil couldn’t even take refuge in his friendship with Dan, since he continued in whatever funk had consumed him since the Brits.

But Dan got into silent funks sometimes, and eventually he came out of them, and things were good between them again. He wasn’t so sure about the shadow, though, because he knew something had changed there, something had shifted in his own mind to make that last dream different from all others before it.

He worried the shadow might actually be gone forever this time, that perhaps Phil had finally done something truly unforgivable. Something even his own brain couldn’t forgive.

* * *

He’d gone long periods of time without shadow dreams before, actually. When he was in his late teens, he’d thought the shadow dreams had ended entirely, because a couple years went by with no shadow at all.

But then one night he’d been dreaming that he was making fine cutlery out of flowers, when suddenly the shadow had sat beside him on the grass, so close that their arms touched. Phil had looked at the shadow boy, and tonight he looked like Gerard Way. Apparently the shadow boy had discovered My Chemical Romance during his long absence.

But it didn’t really matter what the shadow boy looked like, because he always looked different … what mattered was that Phil  **knew**  him, and Phil knew he  **felt**  sad. They could sense each other that way, know what the other was thinking or feeling, and he knew that his shadow friend was hurting.

Instead of the fanciful cutlery he’d been making, Phil quickly fashioned the surrounding flowers into a voluminous cloak and pulled it around both him and the shadow, pulling his dream friend close under its protection. The cloak was surprisingly soft, and the bright colors brought the warmth of the sun soaking into them, and he felt the shadow boy relax enough to allow his head to fall onto Phil’s shoulder. They’d been the same size when the shadow first sat down, but Phil felt himself suddenly grow larger, large enough to pull the shadow into his lap and hold him tight in his arms within the warm cloak, and the shadow boy began to cry. He tried to hide his face as it shimmered and shifted in and out of Gerard Way’s image, his eyes shifting back and forth between hazel and a warm brown, but Phil saw the tears on the boy’s cheeks as they reflected the vivid colors of the flowers he’d wrapped around their bodies.

They didn’t say anything in that dream, nothing at all. Phil just held the shadow boy until he’d calmed, and then they sat together and watched a sunset in vivid shades of purple and orange and green, and he’d stroked his hands through the shadow boy’s wavy curls that weren’t like Gerard Way’s hair at all, and Phil had hummed some song under his breath, something from one of the video games he liked. And finally the shadow had sighed … and slowly relaxed … and then began humming along with him.

That peaceful moment beneath the flower cloak, watching the sunset with the shadow boy, was one of Phil’s favorite memories of his first year at university. His favorite memory from that year, and it had happened only in his dreams.

He didn’t see the shadow again that year.

But then finally, one night, he had returned … and Phil had been having shadow dreams fairly often ever since. Sometimes a few months would go by, but the shadow always came back.

Until now. This time he worried the shadow may have disappeared for good.

* * *

It seemed like preparing for the tour took up most of their waking hours, and yet somehow he and Dan still found time every day to sit and talk and laugh over stupid things, and play dumb Bishi Bashi games, and just be  **them**. Dan had emerged from his funk and seemed mostly his usual self. Mostly.

Phil wondered what it would be like to be on tour for such an extended period together.  Would it be different than just being flatmates? He glanced at Dan out of the corner of his eye, and noticed a piece of popcorn on Dan’s shoulder. They hadn’t even had a food fight or anything … Dan had just been eating popcorn while they watched tv. How had some ended up on his shoulder, of all places? Phil smirked.

Without saying anything, he calmly picked the popcorn off the shoulder of Dan’s t-shirt and stuck it in his mouth. Dan turned to look at him, startled. Phil chewed placidly.

“Did you just … did you just take food … off my shoulder … and eat it?” Dan asked in obvious disbelief.

Phil shrugged, swallowed, and nodded. “Why waste good popcorn? I don’t mind getting your shoulder germs.”

Dan quickly looked back at the tv. “Rewind a little,” he requested. “We missed a bit when you were eating food off my frickin’  **body** , Phil.” A flush was spreading from his cheeks to the tips of his ears and down his neck. Phil went back to the start of the current scene, since he’d been distracted even earlier than Dan had.

Dan’s words echoed in his head, along with images he tried to banish immediately. Eating food off Dan’s body? Phil turned his attention to the television with grim determination and refused to think of anything … inappropriate.

Flatmates. Just … flatmates.

* * *

That night, he dreamt he was in a wide clearing beside a shimmering lake, a dark sky absolutely dazzling with millions of tiny stars in different colors stretching above his head. He gazed up in wonder, and it took only a moment before he recognized his friend.

“It’s you,” he breathed. “You came back! But … how can you be … how can you be the sky? How can you be the stars?”

The shadow told him, “If I can be a fox, or a butterfly, why can’t I be the stars? I can be anything I want to be here.”

Phil stared up at the Milky Way stretching overhead, stared up at his friend in this unexpected guise, and could find no words.

He felt the shadow begin to pull away from him. It wasn’t a physical thing—the sky and stars still filled the space above him—but the shadow, his friend, began to pull away from him. He could feel it inside, and he tried to reach out, to stop him from going. It was as if he grabbed his friend’s hand as he walked away, except that it only happened in their hearts. The shadow gazed down at him, and he seemed sad again.

“Why did you want to be the sky?” Phil asked, curious. The shadow had never done anything quite so dramatic before.

The shadow didn’t reply immediately, but eventually Phil heard a soft, hesitant, “I wanted you to think I was beautiful.” Some of the stars seemed to wink out, while others dimmed, as if the shadow was trying to hide his face.

“You  **are**  beautiful,” Phil said, hoping the shadow would stay, now that he had finally returned.

They gazed at each other, the young man among the dewy summer grasses and the stars twinkling across the inky sky. “I’m sorry I kissed you.”

Phil was surprised. The words hadn’t come from him.

“Are you mad?”

Phil shook his head, confused but definitely not angry. “I can’t really remember what happened,” he admitted, embarrassed. “You kissed me? I was worried that I had kissed you and you were offended.”

“I tried to make you forget,” the stars told him, and Phil could feel how afraid the shadow was, “because I thought you might not let me into your dreams again if you remembered.”

Phil stopped looking at the sky, stopped trying to  **see**  his friend, and closed his eyes. He tried instead to just  **feel**  him, the way they had always been able to feel and know and understand each other since childhood. He stood there and just  **felt** , letting everything inside him shine out like the shadow’s stars were shining.

He sensed the emotional jolt when the shadow understood, when the shadow felt what was inside Phil, and then suddenly he opened his eyes to find stars swirling all around him in a giddy dance. Gradually, they coalesced into the form of a young man, a man made of starlight, and that man, a shadow man now made of light, leaned forward and pressed his lips to Phil’s.

And it was  **glorious**.


	4. No Such Thing As Magic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phil doesn't need magic—he's got Dan

Around age 10, Phil first started noticing that he seemed to attract weird people on the street and on the bus, and he worried that it meant something was wrong with him. But his grandma had told him it was just “the Skill.”

His grandma knew a lot of things, including how to read tarot cards and tea leaves and other mysterious things. She knew about magic. And she told him that she had something called “the Skill,” and that he had it, too. She said it was genetic, but not everyone got it.

She said they were special.

Many people in the family thought Grandma was crazy, but Phil loved her, and he trusted her, and he didn’t think she was crazy at all. They spent long afternoons just talking as she lay cards out in various patterns or just shuffled them idly, or looked at the palms of Phil’s hands, or just sipped her tea and talked about the ways the world really works, which was always much more interesting than what they taught him at school.

She told him that quite a few people had the Skill, but most never knew it, because it worked differently in each person. She thought maybe, long ago, it had once been something everyone had, but now it only showed up in a comparative few, and some only faintly.

Her own Skill leaned toward divination, but everyone was different. Some might be able to influence other people’s thoughts, or communicate across long distances, or make themselves pass unnoticed, or manipulate their dreams. Really, it could be almost anything.

Phil’s Skill drew people to him, she said. And so other people who had a bit of the Skill, even if they didn’t know it, would feel compelled to approach him, would want to be near him or interact with him. That’s why strangers sometimes reacted oddly to him. They were just people with a bit of the Skill, being drawn to him for reasons they didn’t understand. Grandma’s imagination had always seemed a bit wild, so Phil didn’t know what to think, but he listened, because she was his grandma and he loved her, and she gave him ginger cakes with lemon icing.

He shouldn’t be afraid, she said—the Skill was a  **good**  thing. And oftentimes, if two people’s Skill worked in complementary ways, it could form an unbreakable bond. It had been like that for her and his granddad. Her Skill had told her that he would come into her life someday, that he would be her soulmate, but she didn’t know anything about him except that they were connected. She didn’t know what his name was or what he would look like, only that he would come. And his Skill, weaker than hers, only gave him the power to recognize the Skill in others. But when he came up to her at a cousin’s wedding and asked her to dance, their eyes met and she immediately knew this was him, the man she’d always seen in her future. And she could see in his face that he knew it, too.

And so, since Phil’s Skill drew people to him … someday, another Skilled one who was drawn to Phil could turn out to be his soulmate, just like her and his granddad. Her own Skill at divination told her that it  **would**  happen. Someday, Phil’s Skill would draw his soulmate to him, and their bond would be stronger than he could possibly imagine.

Phil listened, but as he grew older he became less and less sure that he believed it. Even though he loved his grandma, he was pretty sure there wasn’t any real magic in the world, not like in his dreams. And, as years went by, he never saw any proof of anything she’d said. He never heard or read any other reference to “the Skill,” no matter how much he searched. Strange people continued to accost him in public for no apparent reason, but he never found any “soulmate” … and after his grandma died, he slowly forgot the last traces of any faith he’d once had in her magical knowledge or ability to predict the future.

Whenever someone would bark at him on the street or say something particularly strange out of nowhere, Phil would think wryly to himself, “Yeah, that’s because I’ve got the Skill,” but he didn’t really believe it. He couldn’t remember if he ever really had.

* * *

The first time Dan came to visit him in Manchester, Phil met him at the train station, and when their eyes met for the first time something like electricity arced between them. Phil immediately glanced away, then shyly back again, and they smiled at each other. He felt some strange sense of recognition, but convinced himself it was just the result of dozens of hours on Skype.

“I can’t believe I’m really here,” Dan had said, sounding awestruck. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for so long and now … here we both are!” Phil had opened his arms, and Dan had dove in for a tight hug.

“I’m glad I was finally able to lure you away from the captivating delights of wonderful Wokingham,” Phil joked as he released Dan again, immediately missing the warmth of the slim body against him.

“I just couldn’t stay away from you and your animal magnetism,” Dan grinned. Phil raised both hands like claws and roared, making Dan laugh.

* * *

In the years that followed, Phil would always be grateful to the universe for bringing such a wonderful friend into his life, and it all really started with YouTube, and with that day in the train station.

It was like Fate.

Maybe his grandma would have said that the Skill drew Dan to him, that maybe all those weird people on the street were just the price he paid for having the power to draw this one person to him at the right time … but Phil didn’t believe in the Skill anymore, if he ever had, and the Internet certainly made a lot more sense as an explanation. Even  **Fate**  made more sense, or at least a lot more people believed in it. Nobody believed in “the Skill.” It was just some idea his crazy grandma had come up with to romanticize how she met his granddad.

And now she was gone, not there to argue with him, and so Phil dismissed his occasional wonderings about how magical it seemed that Dan had ended up coming into his life the way he had. He supposed thoughts like those were what led people to make up romantic, mystical, ridiculous stories about things like “the Skill.” Okay, maybe tarot cards and tea leaves might be fun, and they might make for entertaining videos or party tricks, but they weren’t really magic. They weren’t really  **real**.

YouTube and Twitter and the Internet were  **real** , and they had brought Dan into his life. It was that simple.

He didn’t need to believe in magic. He didn’t  **need**  magic. He had  **Dan**.

* * *

And … at night … he had his shadow. Nearly every night now, since the time with the starlight, they came together in his dreams.

Often literally.

He spent his days with Dan, his best friend in the  **real**  world … and he spent his nights with his oldest, truest friend, the one who had always been there for him, but only in his dreams. The one who—he could  **feel**  it, the way he could always feel things in his shadow dreams—the one who  **loved**  him. Really, truly, deeply  **loved**  him. Loved him in a way Dan never would, with kisses and touches and passion and want. And, yes, Phil loved the shadow, too. His dreams were filled with desire and pleasure and the bone-deep knowledge that he was cherished. So, yes, of course he loved the shadow.

But maybe not exactly the same way he loved Dan. Because Dan was  **real** , and the shadow was just a dream.

If anyone had ever forced him to choose, Phil would have chosen the Dan who didn’t love him over the shadow who did, because Dan was  **Dan**. The shadow was just part of Phil’s imagination and always had been.

It was just that, as his sexual and romantic frustration had grown in daily life, his subconscious had apparently taken to satisfying it in his dreams … where Dan would never know and it could never ruin their friendship.

Dan never needed to know how Phil spent his dreaming nights.

Even when they slept every night side-by-side on the tour bus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My basic idea of “the Skill” comes from an excellent series of fantasy novels by Robin Hobb, though I have skewed the concept quite a bit for my own purposes. The series starts with a novel called _Assassin’s Apprentice_ , and I highly recommend it.
> 
> And thank you again to my beloved patrons, @jorzuela, @itsjustmestef, and she who shall not be named!


	5. Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I had an imaginary friend like that, too...

It hadn’t made any sense for one of them to sleep in the uncomfortable bunks, regardless of any rock-paper-scissors game they’d played on camera for the documentary. They might not advertise it to the outside world, but they were perfectly comfortable with platonically sharing a fairly spacious bed on the tour bus. They were close friends—the closest—and not homophobic, so why should either of them twist themselves into a 6’2” pretzel every night? It just wouldn’t have made any sense.

So they shared the bed. Platonically.

And it wasn’t weird.

Mostly.

Except for the dreams.

Because every night now, Phil had shadow dreams that had taken on an entirely new dimension. Phil had been a small boy when he first invented his shadow friend, and so their relationship had been that of any two small children having fun together.

But Phil was a man now. And the daily frustrations of going to bed every night beside someone he was hopelessly in love with, someone beautiful and golden and dimpled, someone who smiled at him with a special soft smile he never shared with other people, someone who thought he was funny and brilliant, someone with whom he spent every evening performing a show they had created together, about a  **world**  they had created together … it all apparently left him with longings that his subconscious could not handle except by finding another outlet.

And so the shadow had become his lover. Every night, they eventually found each other. Even if Phil was dreaming about something else, the shadow would break through and the dream would change until they were in each other’s arms and Phil felt a sense of completeness and fulfillment that he’d never felt with any of his lovers in the real world.

That made sense, though, because the shadow was a lover he had created for himself, and so of course he would create his own ideal match, someone who knew every aspect of him and every secret wish, and loved him beyond description anyway. Someone who balanced him and complemented him and knew without asking what would please him best. Someone magical and fascinating and just … perfect. Someone with whom he could literally  **become one**  in the dream world they shared.

Because who wouldn’t want that? Who wouldn’t want a lover who could simply  **feel**  your internal thoughts and longings, and act on them to give you pleasure like you’d never experienced before? Who wouldn’t want that?

Phil woke every morning to a heartbreakingly wonderful split-second of feeling lazily sated and blissful, feeling well-loved and well-fucked, until he turned to look at the beautiful man beside him and remembered that this wasn’t his lover whose head rested on the pillow beside his. His lover didn’t actually even exist, and Phil was just a pathetic man creating a dream outlet for his unrequited emotions for someone who didn’t even notice him in that way.

And so Phil started every morning with a guilty conscience, gazing across the bed at the sleeping face of the man who had no idea of the very non-innocent ideas that occupied Phil’s brain so much of the time.

He was beyond pathetic—he was  **pitiful**. And more than a little miserable every day, despite the bliss of his nights.

* * *

They were sitting in a diner in some town in the middle of America somewhere. The tour was such a whirlwind that Phil never really knew where he was anymore and just went where he was told to go and did what he was told to do until it was time to go on stage and perform the show again.

This place didn’t seem to have much on the menu except burgers and fries, and a bunch of different kinds of pie, but it was close to their hotel and so the four of them had walked over to have a quiet meal together. An honest-to-goodness jukebox in the corner was playing actual vinyl records as if they were in some kind of Elvis Presley movie, but Phil didn’t recognize any of the songs. Old stuff, he guessed, from back when they were still making records like that.

His mind started to wander as Dan chatted companionably with Martyn and Cornelia. Last night’s dream had started with music, too … because the shadow himself had entered the dream as a song, something slow and plaintive and lovely … and he hadn’t taken physical form until Phil had already begun swaying to the music. They were in the same lake-side glade where the shadow had first transformed from stars into a man made of starlight, and as he transitioned from song to man he had shone just as brightly, bright as a star but without hurting Phil’s eyes to look at him, in fact making him want to look forever at nothing else…

“How about you, Phil?”

Phil’s head jerked up. He’d completely lost track of the conversation. And his meal. He looked down at the plate of fries he’d been picking at and his half-eaten burger. He looked back at Cornelia, who had asked him the question. “Um … what?”

Cornelia chuckled. “Lost in a fog as usual. We were talking about imaginary friends. I had one when I was little, but I’m guessing you didn’t hear anything I said about her. I was asking if you had any imaginary friends when you were a kid.”

Martyn wiped his mouth and added, “Yeah, I don’t remember you talking about any, but did you?”

Phil glanced from face to face, panicking as he thought of last night’s erotic dream events. He really didn’t want to talk about this. He made a non-committal noise, shrugged, and punted the question to Dan. “How about you? Any imaginary friends?”

Dan chewed and swallowed, looking pensive. “Sort of. I guess so. One. Except I never really thought of him as imaginary. More like another real, actual boy, but I would just slip into his dreams sometimes at night and we would do stuff together.” His expression grew shuttered and he looked down at his plate and pushed it away. “I’ve had enough. How about you guys? Shall we head back?”

Martyn looked around for their waitress, musing, “I want pie. They have a dozen different kinds, I think.”

Cornelia enthused, “Oooh! Pie! Me, too!”

But Phil was distracted by what Dan had said. He couldn’t believe Martyn and Cornelia hadn’t followed up with any additional questions. Hesitantly, Phil asked, “So … you had an imaginary friend in your dreams? When you were a kid?”

Dan shrugged awkwardly. “It’s hard to explain. It was like they were  **his**  dreams, but I was able to visit. I always thought of him as some other boy living somewhere else in the world, but I didn’t know where. We never talked about our real lives. We were too busy going on adventures.”

Cornelia looked intrigued now, forgetting momentarily about her quest for pie. “What kind of adventures?”

Dan smiled, his dimples showing. “Oh, terribly derivative stuff. Tolkien and Narnia and Final Fantasy and all that sort of thing. Sometimes we were climbing mountains and fighting giant spiders or crawling through tunnels or looking for buried treasure. Sometimes we fought dragons. Sometimes we  **were**  dragons. It was pretty fun, actually. I always looked forward to those dreams. They were my favorites.” His gaze seemed distant now, as if he was lost in fond memories.

Phil just stared at him. He’d never heard of someone else having the same kind of dreams! “What did your friend look like?” he asked, suddenly intensely curious.

Dan frowned slightly, then tilted his head a bit in contemplation. “He always looked different. Well, almost always, anyway. But I always knew it was him.” Dan glanced at Phil. “You know, that way you tend to just  **know**  things in dreams, without there being any good reason for you to know them.”

Phil nodded, extremely familiar with that feeling.

Dan continued, musing, “Sometimes he looked like an animal, or a regular boy but covered in leaves or feathers or something. Sometimes he looked just like me, like looking in the mirror but having another person there talking back to you. Sometimes he even looked like a tree or something, but I could still recognize him, still understand him.”

Phil was leaning forward without even realizing it. “I had a dream friend like that when I was a kid, too,” he admitted at last, still feeling shocked that anyone else had experienced something similar to what he had always assumed was something weirdly unique to him.

“Yeah?” Dan asked, perking up. “What were they like?”

Phil shrugged. “Like what you said. They looked different in different dreams, but I always knew it was them. And we had all kinds of adventures and stuff. It was really fun.” They grinned at each other.

“And now you’re having adventures in real life!” Cornelia interjected, making Phil jump a little. He’d sort of forgotten that he and Dan weren’t alone in this conversation, it had seemed so unexpectedly confidential, sharing something he’d never shared with anyone before. But … maybe lots of people had these kinds of dreams. Maybe he just hadn’t heard about it. Maybe it really wasn’t so special after all.

But it had always  **felt**  special.

 **Last night**  had certainly felt special.

“Right!” Dan said, and at first Phil was so lost in thoughts of last night’s dream that didn’t know what Dan was responding too. “We’re on our great tour adventure across America.” He met Phil’s eyes and smiled. “Everything in the past year or so has seemed like an adventure, to be honest, with the book and everything. It hardly even seems real.”

But it  **was** , Phil reminded himself. This was real. Just because other people had imaginary friend dreams too didn’t make it any more real. They were still just dreams.

Dan was  **real**. The tour was  **real**.

The shadow was just in his head.

“When did your imaginary friend dreams stop?” Martyn asked Dan. “How old were you?” He glanced back and forth between Phil and Dan, casually curious.

Dan’s face closed off, and Phil wondered why. At the same time, he hoped none of them were going to press  **him**  to answer that question, because he didn’t want to lie, but he also didn’t want to announce, “Oh, I still see him every night. In fact, I had the best sex of my life last night with my imaginary friend!” He could just picture their appalled reactions. The embarrassment. The pity.

Luckily, the waitress arrived at that moment, and Martyn and Cornelia blithely turned their attention to a discussion of what flavors of pie were available and which were most highly recommended.

Phil met Dan’s eyes briefly, but they both looked away. A moment ago, the conversation had seemed so intimate … and now something uneasy lurked beneath. Probably just Phil’s guilty conscience.

“No pie for me, thank you,” he replied when the waitress got his attention. His three companions all turned to him in surprise. Okay, maybe it was unusual for him to turn down dessert. But some sort of knot had developed in his stomach. He smiled weakly, and noticed that Dan looked a little concerned. He tried to make his smile look a little more convincing, but Dan didn’t look fooled.

At least Dan couldn’t see through him the way the shadow could. He could keep secrets from Dan. In fact, he had to.

Phil looked out the window, but it was so dark in the parking lot outside that he saw only his own reflection … and his face looked sad.


	6. Bad Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's nice to have a shadow who loves you unconditionally ... but it's difficult when what you really want is Dan

Phil was lying on his back in a field of cornflowers, gazing up at the sky above him which shifted in swirling shades of blue and purple and violet, colors so vivid that the bright cornflowers themselves seemed like little pieces of sky sprung up from the earth.

The shadow lay beside him, their hands touching. Warm. Sometimes it was enough to just be together like this, just be with someone, someone he loved who loved him back, somehow who understood him and liked him anyway,  **loved**  him anyway, someone from whom he had no secrets.

Just lying there together, gazing up at the sunlit sky, with only their hands touching, they were more intensely joined than he’d ever been with anyone else in his life.

Then the shadow rolled over to kiss him, and it was even better.

* * *

He woke slowly without immediately opening his eyes. He could hear the engine of the tour bus, the tires against the road, and the incredibly soft sound of Dan’s breathing in the bed beside him … a sound which had now grown painfully familiar. He lay there for a moment, remembering the field of cornflowers, the feeling of his beloved lying beside him, and he superimposed the memory onto this moment, imagining Dan as the person who loved him so completely.

But the illusion wouldn’t hold.

Phil opened his eyes, and saw that Dan lay on his side facing him, still asleep, a small smile tilting the corners of his mouth. He looked … happy. Like he had good dreams.

Phil allowed himself a long moment of self-indulgent heartache, then carefully got out of bed, trying not to wake Dan, and left the room to go get himself some coffee. He sat at the small table and drank it while he stared out the window, not really seeing the American landscape rushing by. Seeing cornflowers instead, and wishing himself back into that field.

* * *

Sometimes Phil wished he could just sleep through the rest of the tour. Just wake up to go on stage each night, do the show, and spend the rest of his time sleeping. Because at least when he slept there was a chance of seeing the shadow.

Sometimes he wished he could just live in that dream world. Sometimes he didn’t even care that it wasn’t real.

Because the tour was great, of course. Seeing their fans was great. Seeing all their hard work come to fruition was creatively fulfilling and all that. But Dan seemed different lately. Distracted, but in an uncharacteristically daydreamy, almost blissful sort of way. Like when your mate gets loopy over a new girl and suddenly doesn’t catch half of what you say anymore, like he’s lost in another world most of the time with a sappy grin on his face. He’d never seen Dan like this.

It made no sense. They were in the middle of the tour, so obviously Dan hadn’t met someone and gotten involved with anyone new, right? Just to be sure, Phil subtly kept an eye on Dan’s behavior around the members of the crew and didn’t notice anything unusual, so that seemed unlikely. And Dan spent every night in bed with  **him** , so he’d have a tough time hiding any illicit liaisons.

Maybe it was just the joy of the tour? Dan always seemed to get a sort of emotional high after a show, hyper when Phil just wanted to collapse in a sweaty pile of accomplished exhaustion. Maybe that’s what put that faraway look in his eye and created the tiny smile that never seemed to entirely disappear.

Phil found himself actually missing Dan’s usual habitual dourness, because without the Dan he knew, he felt even more alone. And Dan was distracted enough that he didn’t even seem to notice. It was like he didn’t even  **see**  Phil anymore, just played out his role onstage and otherwise went around in a solitary fog of private contentment.

Dan had said he used to have shadow dreams, too, back when he was a kid. So he was another shadow dreamer. He’d said it felt like he was actually stepping into someone else’s dream when he did it.

So … would it be so wrong … if Phil let himself imagine … when he was with the shadow … would it really be so wrong … if he thought about … if he imagined that it was … Dan? Dan just … stepping into his dream? Would that be so bad of him? To imagine that the incredible emotional connection extended beyond his dreams and into the real world, into a  **real**  relationship. Well, friendship. What Phil  **wished**  was a relationship beyond friendship.

Would it be so wrong to let himself imagine it?

“You don’t look so well.” The voice jolted Phil out of his thoughts. He came back to himself, sitting on the sofa in their dressing room, hugging his pillow from home because he’d thought he might take a nap between rehearsals. He looked up to see Dan, brows furrowed in apparent concern. It was more attention than he’d paid to Phil off-stage in a while.

Phil smiled thinly and stretched himself out on the sofa as much as he could, stuffing his pillow under his head. “Just tired,” he lied, and closed his eyes, not wanting to see that look on Dan’s face, that look like he really cared.

Phil knew Dan cared—of course he did, they were best friends—he just didn’t care the way Phil  **wanted**  him to. He’d seen too much of the real Phil over the years, too much of the annoying insecurities, too much of the cereal thief who left cabinets open, too much of the early morning pre-coffee grumpiness, too much of the ridiculous animal obsessions, too much of the bouncing childlike excitement over things Dan thought were stupid.

He’d seen too much of the real Phil. And, unlike Phil’s idealized dream lover, he didn’t want the real Phil. Didn’t  **love**  the real Phil. Except as a friend. Of course as a friend.

“I guess that’s what it means,” Phil mumbled, half asleep now as he nestled his head against his familiar blue-and-green pillow on the arm of the dressing room sofa. “That’s when they really love you. When they see how imperfect you are, and they still think you’re perfect.” Tears leaked from beneath his closed eyelids and he absently rubbed them into the pillow case.

He dimly thought he heard Dan ask something, but Dan had left, hadn’t he? Dan had left him. Of course he had.

“Just a dream,” Phil murmured into his pillow, and then he was asleep.

* * *

The shadow never came to him when he was napping backstage or otherwise crashed out in some unconventional locale.

Given their sleeping situation, it was ironic that the shadow dreams only ever happened when Phil properly went to bed for the night … ironic because it meant the shadow dreams only ever happened now when he slept with Dan lying beside him.

* * *

That night, Phil dreamt that he could breathe underwater, and so he was swimming in a river with some otters, and he could speak otter language so they were all his friends. They taught him to do great rolls and flips in the water, but then they said a giant lizard was coming and so they all swam away, and he was left all alone, but he didn’t think that lizards could swim. Could lizards swim? In the dream he started to get worried, because he had the image in his mind of what the otters had been thinking when they got afraid of the lizard, and it had a gigantic mouth filled with thousands of very sharp teeth, like a reptilian shark on steroids.

But then the river water around him began to flow smoothly against his skin in a way that felt different than before. More purposeful. Soothing. But also … provocative. And Phil smiled. He dived deeper into the water, not having to worry about breathing, and let his hands trail through the entity surrounding him.

“I know it’s you,” he said, without really saying it. Saying it just in his own mind, but that’s the way they always talked in the dreams. And the water tickled his fingertips, then his ribs. Phil giggled and stretched, pressing as much of himself against the shadow water as he could, and soon there was another slick body pressing and sliding against his own as they glided through the river. “There’s a shark lizard coming,” Phil told the shadow, but he didn’t really feel afraid anymore. It was more of a casual sharing of information, not really a warning. Because how could he feel afraid of a lizard shark when the shadow had come? Nothing bad ever happened in the shadow dreams. They might encounter terrible dangers and overcome extreme challenges, but in the end everything always turned out right. Shadow dreams were always good dreams, with only the best, most exciting kind of danger.

The thought made Phil think of something else dangerous, and a thrill went through him. He ran his hands along the lithe form swimming beside him, and he imagined that it was Dan. Dan, who had stepped into his dream. Dan, here because he loved him and thought he was perfect and wanted to be with him. He could feel the emotion radiating from the shadow, just as he always could, and he imagined that the overwhelming adoration came from Dan, not just a sad imaginary friend he’d conjured up as a kid and held onto his whole life. Not just a pathetic substitute he’d created for himself. But  **Dan**. The  **real**  Dan. Here with him in his dream, taking shape out of the water and embracing Phil as if he never wanted to let go. Phil clung to him, and their sinewy bodies twined together in the water.

Phil got an image in his mind of the otters, of how they slept on the surface of the water, holding hands so they wouldn’t float away from each other in their sleep, and he wanted to float like that with the shadow, with his shadow Dan … he wanted them to be otters, and float holding each other so that nothing would ever separate them.

But the shadow was pulling away, and suddenly they weren’t in water anymore but instead were intertwined in a sea of soft grasses that whispered around them in the slight breeze.

“I want to show you something,” the shadow confided hesitantly, and he sounded nervous for the first time in many years, maybe since they’d been small children. Phil reached to clasp his hand and squeezed it in reassurance. And then the shadow leaned away so that Phil could see his face.

And Phil immediately recoiled, pulling his hand from the shadow’s grasp as if he’d been burned. “Why would you…? Why…?” Even in his dream, Phil couldn’t formulate a complete thought.

Why would the shadow choose to look like  **Dan**?

Why those specific eyes, that specific hair, those specific lips, those very specific dimples? Even the eyelashes were recognizably Dan’s. Why? Why would the shadow do this? Was it because he had seen the image in Phil’s thoughts? They’d always been able to see into each other’s minds on an instinctive level. Was this some kind of grotesque attempt to give Phil what he really wanted by wearing Dan’s face in the dream?

Phil rolled away and retched into the grass. This was his own fault for imagining Dan. He shouldn’t have done it. He clenched his eyes shut in the dream and tried to block out everything, tried to wake himself up from the first shadow dream that had ever turned into a nightmare, but he felt a warm palm touch his shoulder and he jerked violently away, refusing to open his eyes.

“Promise me that you’ll never do that again,” he husked out urgently. “Don’t … don’t wear that face.”

The shadow didn’t say anything, but Phil could feel the confusion surrounding him like a haze of pain. Phil just curled in on himself and shuddered, disgusted with himself for profaning what had once been such beautiful dreams by using them as some sort of masturbatory tool for fantasizing about his oblivious best friend. “Just … don’t,” he whispered bleakly. “Please.” His voice had trailed away to nothing, but he still had not opened his eyes.

After a time, he felt a tickling sensation against his left hand. He shifted his fingers slightly, and a tiny soft weight settled in his palm. Phil opened his eyes to see a small white mouse in his hand, pink nose twitching nervously, and the shadow mouse squeaked, “I’m sorry.” If mice could cry, he knew this is what it would sound like, as the shadow apologized in a tiny voice over and over again until Phil stroked the furry white head with his finger and shushed him until the little mouse was quiet again, though still trembling.

Misery poured off the shadow mouse in waves, so Phil continued to pet him gently, comforting them both until the dream faded, disintegrating and dispersing like autumn leaves in a strong wind … just floating away until only darkness remained.

* * *

The next morning, Phil woke to an empty bed. Dan always slept later than he did, so it immediately felt wrong.

He made his way to the kitchenette area to find Dan sitting with Martyn, who shot Phil an unreadable glance. Dan took a sip of the coffee in front of him, then sat merely staring into it. No trace of the uncharacteristically sunny disposition so much in evidence lately.

Martyn looked up at Phil again and raised an eyebrow questioningly. Phil just shrugged. He sat down in the only other available seat, beside Dan.

Martyn smiled and tried to joke. “Why the long face, Dan? You look like you just lost your best friend!” Martyn glanced pointedly at Phil to make the jest clear.

But Dan hadn’t looked up. He just mumbled, “I think maybe I did,” and then took another slow sip of coffee, still staring down.

Phil elbowed him, just lightly, just a reminder of his presence, and Dan looked over at him, empty eyes jerking in surprise to meet Phil’s. Phil could actually see him gather himself together as his lips formed a semblance of a smile and he bantered with obvious effort, “I keep trying to lose him, but it never works.” He elbowed Phil back, acting like everything was normal, but Phil knew him too well.

The hollowness of Dan’s eyes and voice only magnified Phil’s own unease this morning.

Martyn kept glancing from one of them to the other, frowning slightly. “You two all right? Not getting sick, are you? Didn’t sleep well?”

Dan and Phil replied quietly in unison, “Bad dreams.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hang in there, folks! It's a soulmates AU, right? So you know it'll all work out. Maybe just another couple chapters of angsty stuff.


	7. He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phil figures something out

Martyn decided that Phil had come down with a virus and encouraged him to sleep whenever they had a spare half hour in the schedule. Phil felt guilty worrying his brother over nothing, but he still took advantage of the excuse to hide from everyone as much as possible.

He hadn’t had a shadow dream in a week.

He kept remembering the shadow mouse, how upset he’d been … but he also kept remembering when the shadow had looked like Dan, and how that had made Phil feel like a monster. Like he’d gotten himself a blow-up doll and dressed it up like Dan and had sex with it … like an obsessive pervert. Except even worse than that, because the shadow wasn’t a blow-up doll. The shadow was special, so  **incredibly**  special to him. And he’d  **used**  the shadow, used him like a blow-up doll, like a disposable sex toy.

He felt like he’d betrayed the two most important people in his life at exactly the same time, by using one as a stand-in for the other.

He kept reminding himself that the shadow wasn’t real, that he couldn’t offend the shadow or hurt the shadow’s feelings or betray the shadow, because the shadow was just a product of his own imagination. But it didn’t feel that way to him.

And the shadow hadn’t come back.

* * *

When Phil was half-napping backstage one afternoon, Dan brought him a cup of water and set it on the floor beside the sofa he was lying on. Phil stirred and looked up blearily. Dan smiled down at him and pulled over a folding chair so he could sit close by, then handed Phil his glasses from the nearby table. Phil put them on and sat up a little.

“How you feeling?” Dan asked, gaze soft and concerned. It almost brought tears to Phil’s eyes, because it had been so long since he felt like Dan really looked at him, really  **saw**  him. And now it was only because of some fake illness.

Phil cleared his throat, saw the cup of water, and raised it to take a sip. Suddenly very thirsty, he sat up enough to drain the glass, then set it back down and wiped his mouth. His eyes met Dan’s. “Thanks for the water,” he said.

Dan shrugged. “No problem. I’m sorry you aren’t feeling great. I wish we were home, where we could just watch movies on your laptop until you fell asleep in your own bed, and you didn’t have to worry about all this tour stuff.”

“All part of the adventure, though, right?” Phil quipped hoarsely, and Dan grinned at him.

“At least we’re still in it together.”

Phil reached out a hand and grasped Dan’s, which wasn’t something they did. Dan looked at him, confused. “I’ve missed you,” Phil admitted quietly. “We haven’t really talked. Not like we usually do. Not for a while.”

Dan nodded slowly, looking down at the floor. “I’ve been distracted,” he said, and Phil couldn’t identify the emotion in his voice, but something was definitely there. Then Dan looked back up to meet his eyes and squeezed Phil’s hand as he continued, “I’m sorry if I’ve been being a self-absorbed dick. I’ll try to be a better friend.” He tucked Phil’s arm and hand under the throw blanket covering him and patted his shoulder gently. “Now try and get some more sleep so you don’t suck onstage tonight.” They smiled at each other and Dan left.

Phil felt like something wound tight inside him had loosened a bit, and he was able to relax enough to fall asleep and take an actual nap.

* * *

The next morning, Phil woke slowly to a sensation that made him wonder if he was still dreaming, if the shadow had finally come back to him.

A body was pressed up behind him, spooning him, warm arms wrapped around him and holding him close, warm breath caressing the nape of his neck.

And then he recognized the sound of the tour bus engine, the tires on the road, and realized that Dan was the one holding him. The room was dim, but he glanced down and saw Dan’s large hands resting against the paleness of his own skin, then closed his eyes and just luxuriated in being surrounded by Dan’s presence. He tried not to feel guilty. He was sure Dan had done it unconsciously in his sleep, but he could enjoy it while it lasted.

* * *

After two weeks with no shadow dreams, Phil began to feel a bit of panic. The shadow had seemed upset enough that he really might not come back this time. Sure, Phil had worried about it before, but now he just had a really bad feeling.

He decided to perform an experiment. A completely ridiculous experiment. Really, just the stupidest experiment ever. But he decided he might as well try.

He might as well try using his supposed Skill ability to draw the shadow to him.

And so he went to bed each night beside Dan and lay there as Dan’s breath evened out into sleep. Phil lay there staring at the ceiling, trying to find some kind of power within himself that he didn’t even really believe in, trying to draw on some strength he hadn’t even really understood when his grandma talked about it decades before. And then he would go to sleep.

And nothing happened.

No shadow.

Until the night he dreamt he was a small white mouse, and he burrowed into a nest lined with soft fur and grasses and he curled up with his tail wrapped around him and he closed his little mouse eyes and he thought as hard as he could. There inside his dream, he thought about the shadow. About what the shadow’s mind felt like when they shared thoughts, about what the shadow’s  **self**  felt like when they were together, about that special  **something**  he always recognized no matter what shape the shadow took, whether he was a tree or a squirrel or a starry sky or a flowing river.

And when he heard a quiet noise he opened his eyes to see another white mouse.

The shadow. Hesitating at the entrance to Phil’s mouse nest as if uncertain of his welcome.

“I thought … I heard you calling me,” the shadow mouse squeaked. And Phil leapt to his feet and ran to the shadow, sniffing him with his pink little mouse nose and trying to hug him with little mouse legs, and it made the shadow laugh, and it was the best thing Phil had ever heard.

They ended up curled up together in the nest, warm and cozy and close, just enjoying each other’s presence without needing to talk or go on adventures or do  **anything**. They just lay there together, breathing in and out in unison, together again, and Phil could sense that the shadow was as relieved and content as he was.

* * *

Phil woke again to Dan’s arms around him, but it felt almost like an extension of the dream, as if there was only a hazy barrier between that cozy mouse nest and their tour bus bed, a filmy screen that might dissolve at the slightest breath. But he knew that wasn’t true.

The shadow had finally come back, but as he woke with Dan’s arms around him Phil made a decision. He would not take the shadow as his lover again. They had been friends since childhood, and he would do anything to salvage that friendship … but actively choosing to make love with someone else, even an imaginary someone in his dreams, felt like a betrayal of his feelings for Dan.

It was one thing to be in love and have an unintentional sex dream about someone else. That wouldn’t have made Phil feel guilty. Or, at least, not much. But his relationship with the shadow was different from that. Even though it was in his dreams, he consciously  **chose**  to be with the shadow, to love him and be with him, and he felt that he couldn’t do that anymore. Not since that horrible moment when he’d seen Dan’s face on the shadow and realized how much he was lying to himself.

Can you betray someone who doesn’t even love you? Someone who doesn’t even want your love? Someone who doesn’t even  **know**  that you love them?

On some level he knew other people might think he was crazy, but Phil had begun to feel that loving the shadow meant betraying  **himself** , if nothing else. Betraying what was real in order to enjoy a fantasy. Betraying his true, genuine, absolute love for Dan in order to take solace in an imaginary love he’d created to comfort himself in his loneliness.

Unrequited love, as long as it was real, seemed somehow righter than lying to himself every night.

But at least he could have his dream friend back. He just wouldn’t let it be more than that.

Dan’s arms tightened around him and his breathing changed. He would probably wake soon. Phil gently extricated himself and fled the room to avoid any awkward protestations or apologies.

* * *

The show went great that night, as if he and Dan were on the same wavelength even more than usual. The flow back and forth between them onstage felt effortless, natural, instinctive … and the grin on Dan’s face during the final dance number made Phil giddy.

He didn’t need anything more than this. This was what he wanted. Dan. Even if it was only friendship. That could be enough for him.

When they crawled into bed that night, Dan was loose and exhausted, falling asleep almost immediately with his face unexpectedly pressed into the crook of Phil’s neck, breath stirring Phil’s hair slightly with each quiet exhale. Phil lay there a long time, staring at the darkness of the ceiling, feeling Dan’s warmth beside him and the tickle of his breath on Phil’s skin. The intimacy brought tears to his eyes, since he knew they would return to their separate beds when the tour ended and they returned to the flat. No more sleeping side-by-side. No more waking to Dan’s quiet breathing and sleeping face on the other pillow. He tried not to fall asleep, wanting to hang on to this moment as long as possible, but eventually he couldn’t hold out any longer, and sleep claimed him.

* * *

“Want to play a game?” the shadow asked him almost as soon as he had entered the dream. The shadow looked like Christopher Robin tonight, like a child again for the first time in decades. Phil took the form of a child, too, to match him. They always found a way to match each other.

They stood on a small wooden bridge with a stream flowing underneath. The shadow seemed nervous, uncertain, as if seeking approval or acceptance, so Phil smiled at him and nodded. “What game?”

The shadow showed him how they could drop small sticks into the creek on one side of the bridge, then run to the other side to see which one emerged from underneath first. That one was the winner. But Phil’s stick always won. Every time. Phil eyed the shadow. “Are you cheating to let me win?”

The shadow looked startled, and Phil could feel the other boy’s guilt rushing through him. Why so much guilt? It was just a silly game. Why did it matter if the shadow rigged it so that Phil could win? Phil wrapped his arms around the Christopher Robin shadow, and they were the same height, two small boys again as they had been so long ago. “I just want you to be happy,” the shadow whispered. “I thought winning the game might make you happy.” Phil’s grip tightened and he pulled the shadow closer. After a moment, he felt the other boy tremble slightly in his grasp and realized belatedly that the shadow was crying.

“I’m so sorry,” the shadow sobbed into Phil’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry for being me. I’ll never do it again. If you’ll just still be my friend. I promise I’ll never be me again. I was so afraid you would never let me come back.”

That made no sense at all.

“We’ll always be friends,” Phil promised solemnly. “Always. But … what we were doing before … I just want us to be friends now. Nothing more. Just best friends.”

The shadow nodded slowly without lifting his head from Phil’s shoulder. “Because of what I did.” His voice sounded shredded.

“No!” Phil exclaimed, though that was probably a lie, and they could read each other easily enough that the shadow probably knew it. He tried to explain. “It’s just that … there’s someone else I love. Not a dream person. Someone real. In the real world.”

The shadow raised his head, and he didn’t look like Christopher Robin anymore. He and Phil had both grown taller again, back to their more usual heights, and the shadow was just that: a shadow. No features visible at all. Looking at him was like looking into a void.

“You think I’m not real?” the shadow void said, the sound echoing oddly.

“You’re my imaginary dream friend,” Phil admitted uncomfortably. “I know you aren’t real. But that doesn’t stop us from being friends!”

The shadow had pulled away now, no longer standing in Phil’s embrace, and he was shaking his head slowly back and forth like a wounded animal. “But then why?”

Phil asked, “Why what?”

“If you don’t believe I’m real, then why were you so mad when I showed you my real face?” The shadow’s voice sounded absolutely wracked with anguish.

Phil just stood there, certain that the shadow could feel his complete and utter bafflement. The shadow looked at him, but no eyes were visible. Within the darkness of his outline, a faint smattering of stars were visible, but no human features. Phil looked into the shadow’s face, where the eyes should be, and waited, but nothing happened.

Then suddenly the shadow flowed upward, growing and stretching and expanding until he once again formed a vast starry sky above, and suddenly Phil stood on the bridge in nighttime instead of sunny afternoon.

Still, nothing. The starlight above him shone with a brilliance like scattered diamonds.

After a long moment, Phil heard the shadow in his mind, saying, “You said I was beautiful. When I looked like this, you said I was beautiful. But when I looked like me, you pushed me away. You shouted at me. So I’ll never look like me again. I promise. I’ll never look like me again. I don’t ever want you to hate me like that again.”

Phil floundered for something to say. None of this made any sense at all. “I never hated you! I could never hate you!”

The shadow’s voice was very very quiet in his mind, just the merest whisper of a thought: “When I looked like my real self, my real self from outside the dreams, you hated me.”

An idea had begun growing in Phil’s mind, but it seemed absolutely ridiculous. Absolutely impossible.

“When I looked like this, you said I was beautiful. And when I looked like me, you…”

Phil interrupted him. “You … you aren’t just in my dreams? You’re a real person?” He felt only confusion from the shadow, as if the question made no sense. “Tell me … it’s important! You’re a real person in the real world? Not just someone I made up?”

The starry sky seemed to vibrate with uncertainty. “I’ll look like whatever you want. I’ll never look like me again. I already promised. I’ll never do it again.”

“But…” Phil began haltingly, “but … you’re  **real**.” The implications of this had his head spinning. “Would you … would you show me again … what you really look like? What you look like in the real world?” A shockwave of panicked negation rocked Phil. “I promise,” he hurried to add, “I promise I won’t get mad. I promise I won’t push you away. I just … I didn’t understand before. Will you show me? Please?”

The sky above him seemed to twist and writhe, and then it somehow flowed into a single human shape before him. The sky above was still dark, but not too dark for Phil to recognize the familiar features of Dan’s face. He reached up a hand to rest it against the shadow’s cheek, and the shadow flinched away. “No!” Phil exclaimed. “No! Don’t … don’t be afraid. This is what you look like in the real world? When you aren’t in my dreams?” The shadow nodded his head reluctantly. “And you’re a real person, and you’ve been coming into my dreams since we were kids?” Dan’s brows lowered in obvious consternation, as if Phil was stating the obvious. He gave a single, jerky nod. And now that Phil knew what to look for, he could feel it, feel it in every single molecule of the shadow’s being.

The shadow was Dan. He’d always been Dan.

Phil lifted both his hands to cradle Dan’s face in his palms and gazed intently into those beloved brown eyes. “You are even more beautiful this way than you were as a million stars across the sky.” And he leaned forward and pressed his lips very softly to Dan’s, feeling a gasp escape against his mouth before Dan recovered enough composure to return the gentle kiss. Phil felt the shadow’s voice—Dan’s voice—in his mind, like the voice of the tiny shadow mouse, the quietest, most disbelieving, most hopeful little voice ever, and it asked, “Really?”

Phil sobbed, tears suddenly springing to his eyes at the hurt and anxiety he could feel emanating from Dan in that one sad little word. He pulled Dan into a tight embrace, holding him so close he was probably hurting him, and he insisted in a voice that could leave no lingering doubt, “Really.”

* * *

Phil woke slowly the next morning, finding himself wrapped securely in Dan’s arms again, Dan’s sleeping breath sounding familiarly near his ear, and for the first time he let himself luxuriate in the experience with no guilt or fear. He felt the warm length of Dan’s body pressed against his back, knees tucked in against his, and their hips close enough that he could feel Dan having the male body’s natural reaction to waking up in the morning.

It was so familiar … so wonderfully right and familiar … because he’d lain like this with the shadow a thousand hours, their arms around each other, their bodies entwined, no space between them because they couldn’t stand to be in any way apart from each other.

This was just the first time it was happening in the real world instead of in their dreams, the first time it would be  **really**  them,  **really**  Dan and Phil. The first time it would be really fully  **real**.

He heard Dan sigh and his body moved slightly against Phil’s, his hips inching closer, making his state of arousal more obvious. Phil arched against him and made a small humming sound of approval low in his throat.

And then suddenly Dan’s body jerked away, his arms releasing Phil so abruptly that Phil’s body rolled slightly away as an arm pulled from beneath him. He blinked up at Dan in confusion, and Dan sat up, rubbing at his face. “Jesus!” Dan exclaimed hoarsely, still sounding half asleep. “I’m sorry! I … thought you were someone else. I mean … I must have been dreaming.” He dropped his hands from his face and looked at Phil with miserable apology on his face. “I’m sorry I was … well … you know…” he gestured vaguely toward their lower bodies in an obvious effort to avoid having to actually use the phrase “humping my hard dick against your ass.”

Phil just lay there, looking at Dan in shock. Dan didn’t know. Dan didn’t know it was him? Last night, in the dream … and now … how could Dan not know?

“We’re just friends. Obviously!” Dan’s face looked actually frightened, as if he were terrified that Phil might interpret this morning cuddle as an indication of sincere romantic or sexual interest. Dan smiled hesitantly. “It’s probably just all this sleeping in the same bed, you know? And I was dreaming. I’m sorry.” He looked mortified.

Phil still hadn’t said anything. He was listening to the tone of Dan’s voice, watching the language of his body, reading the expressions on his face. He might not be able to sense Dan’s feelings in reality like he could in their dreams, but one thing was abundantly clear: while Dan might love the person he’d been with in his dreams last night, he felt no such passion for Phil Lester in the real world. Quite the opposite. Everything in his manner since he’d woken screamed his lack of interest.

Phil tried to gather his thoughts, tried to reign in and stamp down the blissful hope that had overtaken him in those first few moments of waking. He might get to enjoy whatever affection they shared in dreams, but he’d gotten the message loud and clear.

Dan didn’t want him. He didn’t want  **Phil**. Not the real Phil in the real world. Not  **him**. Not  **really**. Not at all.

He forced a smile onto his face. “Don’t worry about it!” He rolled his eyes for good measure. “We’ve been friends too long for something stupid to mess things up.” He got out of bed and stretched, trying to act normal. He found his glasses and put them on. “Coffee?”

Dan nodded, shoulders relaxing in apparent relief, and followed Phil out of the room to the kitchenette. He leaned against the counter while Phil made the coffee. “Just imagine what the phan shippers would have made of that!”  Dan said, then laughed.

Phil tried to chuckle, but it came out sounding more like a choked cough. He smiled weakly and made his own coffee stronger than usual.

_Yeah. They might have thought you were actually in love with me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, okay, I’m sorry for ending on yet another angsty note! But things are progressing, right? And it’ll all work out in the end. I promise.


	8. Night and Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dating only in your dreams is kind of complicated

Phil watched Dan all day, noticed the love-drunk gleam in those warm brown eyes, watched the sweet, secret little smiles that flickered into shape when he thought no one was looking. On stage that night, Dan was almost blinding in his beauty and brilliance. Phil felt like the drabbest of sidekicks in comparison.

But that’s the way it was in the real world. Dan soared like a meteor, and in their dreams Phil soared beside him … but when they were both awake, Phil was just the awkward flatmate with both clumsy feet securely on the ground, when he wasn’t tripping over them.

He felt grateful that Dan knew his dream self, that even if he didn’t know it was Phil, he could still see something magical and wonderful and lovable in that person. Some part of Phil, some part deep inside him expressed only in his dreams, was worthy of Dan’s fascination and love … and longing. Because Phil knew Dan longed for him in their dreams. He could feel it. Neither of them wanted to be apart.

It was just painful that Phil still felt that way when he was awake.

Dan flashed him a dazzling grin as they left the stage, hearing the roar of applause behind them. Phil smiled back, but he knew he hadn’t given his best performance in the show tonight … because if he was honest with himself all he wanted was to go to sleep … to be the person Dan loved again.

* * *

They both got ready for bed earlier than usual that night. Phil felt a bit flattered that apparently Dan was in a hurry, too. They had both changed into their pajamas but sat on the seats in the kitchenette, sipping mugs of instant hot chocolate. Dan yawned widely, obviously fake, and stretched his arms in an exaggerated mime of tiredness. “I’m dead on my feet,” he said, getting up to rinse out his mug. “I think I’ll head to bed early tonight.”

Phil nodded obligingly and got up to rinse out his mug as well. “Think I’ll join you. We could both do with some extra rest.” But Dan wasn’t looking at him, instead turning eagerly toward the bedroom, probably not even listening to what Phil said. Phil’s head and shoulders drooped a bit, but he comforted himself with the fact that Dan would be happy to see him in their dreams, even if he didn’t care much about him on the tour bus.

They climbed into bed together as always, and Dan turned on his side, facing away from Phil. “G’night,” he mumbled distractedly, and then seemed to forget Phil was even there. Phil pulled the duvet up to his chin and felt tears spring to his eyes. He hadn’t really expected the difference between dream and reality to hurt this much. But he reminded himself that the sooner he could fall asleep, the sooner he could be with the Dan who loved him.

And so of course he lay there staring up at the darkness of the tour bus ceiling for ages. His heart pounded in his chest, tears stinging his eyes, his breath hitching unevenly. “Just fall asleep,” he kept telling himself desperately. “Just fall asleep. When you’re asleep, he loves you.” But the very thought hurt, because it reminded him that Dan didn’t love the Phil he was right now. The  **real**  Phil.

Eventually, he drifted off without even realizing it. He found himself in a tiny boarded-up shed that looked straight out of Outlast 2 or “The Walking Dead,” and he somehow knew the shack was surrounded by murderous monsters in the night, but he had to find a way to keep them from getting inside. And there was a giant chocolate cake on the table, but he wasn’t allowed to have any. But it didn’t matter anyway, because the monsters would break into the shed soon and then he’d be dead anyway, so it really didn’t matter about the cake.

He could hear the monsters prying at the wood of the door, tearing off splintery pieces, finding their way to him, and he had nowhere to hide. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall, arms wrapped around his shins, face pressed into his knees, helpless, and waited for the monsters to find him. The only thing he could think to do was stay silent and still as possible, and maybe they would all just get bored and go away. It didn’t seem very likely, but it had sometimes worked with bullies in school, and he didn’t have any other ideas. He could feel himself shaking, and he knew he was probably going to die pretty soon.

The door was falling apart under the attack now, and instead of zombies or whatever else Phil had been expecting, long tendrils of black smoke began pouring into the ramshackle room, like the Smoke Monster from “Lost.” The dark smoke wound round and round in spirals and swoops, eventually focusing around Phil’s body huddled on the floor. He found himself surrounded by smoke, but it didn’t smother or choke him as he would expect. Instead, it felt almost like a thick blanket, wrapping him up, protecting him, hiding him from the bad things that might get him, and when the smoke began to clear away, to coalesce into a shape beside him, he realized that it was Dan. But they weren’t in the tiny Outlast shack anymore. Dan solidified to sit beside him on the floor of an elaborate tree house, the furniture all made of gnarled branches and turns of the trunk, bright green leaves all around them in the sunshine, high in the air where no zombies or monsters could possibly reach.

Phil saw there was still a table in the center of the room, though, and the chocolate cake was still on it, undamaged.

He promptly burst into tears.

Dan leaned forward to put a tentative hand on Phil’s shoulder. “Was that not right? I saw you were having a bad dream, and I wanted to make it better, but was that not what you wanted?”

Phil shook his head, wiping his wet face with his hands. “No. It was perfect. Thank you for saving me. And for saving the cake, too.” And he gave a hiccuping kind of little laugh.

Dan laughed shyly, and that was when Phil noticed that he didn’t look like Dan. He was the shadowy silhouette filled with distant stars again. “Why don’t you look like you?” Phil asked, bewildered and disappointed.

Dan’s shadowy self shrugged. Phil could feel the discomfort and uncertainty radiating off of him in waves. “I just wasn’t sure.”

“Wasn’t sure of what?” Phil asked, still confused.

If it was possible for shadows to fidget, Dan definitely fidgeted. “I wasn’t sure if you would still want me looking like that. I know last time it was okay, but I just didn’t know…”

Phil tackled Dan to the floor the same way he’d done in the very first PINOF, exclaiming, “You! I want  **you**! Just the way you are! Exactly the way you are! Be you! Be you again!” And Dan writhed beneath him, giggling, but Phil was relieved to see that he looked like himself again. They sat up, both a bit out of breath, and just looked at each other, both smiling.

“It’s really okay?” Dan asked quietly. “For me to look like this?”

Phil took Dan’s face in his hands and kissed him, long and thorough and passionate, until they were pressed together lying side by side on the treehouse floor. Phil pulled away to look into Dan’s eyes and reassured him again, “I love you. And I love how you look. Just like this. Just exactly the way you are.”

Dan nodded slowly. Then he asked, “When are you going to do it?”

Phil frowned. “Going to do what?”

Dan gestured to Phil’s face. “Show me your real face. What you look like outside the dreams. So I can love you exactly the way you are, too.” His smile held a sweet anticipation, and Phil’s stomach clenched into one giant knot.

“I’m not … um … I’m not ready yet,” Phil stammered. He knew it was a lie. He never planned to show Dan his real face, because that’s when this all would end. But he couldn’t say that. “What do I look like to you right now?”

Dan’s brows knit and he gazed intently at Phil’s face. “Not like … anything … really. Just … you. The you inside. If that makes any sense.” He could obviously tell that Phil didn’t understand. “I can make you look like anything I want … I can make any of this look any way I want,” Dan said … and suddenly the treehouse had disappeared, and he and Phil were flying. They were river spirits like Haku in  _Spirited Away_ , long and sinuous and twining together as they soared over a picturesque fantasy Japanese landscape far below. “I can do anything I want here. I can make either of us look like anything.”

Phil nosed against him with his river spirit snout and rubbed the lengths of their bodies together. “This is fun,” Phil admitted. “I always like our adventures. But I think you’re most beautiful when you look like yourself.”

Dan’s river spirit self smiled and rubbed his head lovingly against Phil’s.

* * *

One night Phil fell asleep and woke in a landscape of gently rolling hills covered in a rainbow of iridescent colors that flickered and shone in the bright sunlight. He gazed around himself in wonder. The colorful grass around him seemed to undulate slightly as if in some kind of gentle breeze, though Phil couldn’t feel movement in the air.

A path of smooth gray cobblestones seemed to beckon him to follow, and so he walked along on bare feet. He wondered what he would look like to Dan tonight. What did Dan  **want**  him to look like? Evan Peters? He considered trying to make himself look like Evan Peters, but then decided that it would just get Dan wondering how Phil knew about that.

It was only a short walk along the path before he found Dan sitting cross-legged on a wooden bench, as if they were in the middle of Hyde Park rather than a dreamscape of shining multi-colored hillsides. Dan patted the bench beside him, and Phil sat, unable to control the smile that immediately spread across his face. Dan himself looked sneaky, as if he had some secret he was eagerly waiting to share. He leaned over to kiss Phil hello, and his lips were the best thing Phil had ever felt or tasted. When Dan pulled away, Phil kept his eyes closed a moment, just savoring the kiss.

“Open your eyes,” Dan whispered. “I made a surprise for you.” He sounded like a kid on Christmas morning, ironic since it was he who wanted to give some gift.

Phil opened his eyes to gaze at Dan’s face shining with happiness and said honestly, “You don’t have to give me anything.”

Dan grinned and said, “But I wanted to. Because I love you.” And then he made a gesture with one of his hands … and thousands of butterflies flew into the air, all different jewel-toned colors, their wings beating gently as they flitted all around the bench, above all of the surrounding landscape. Phil caught his breath, watching the delicate wings moving slowly, watching the butterflies fly and float and flutter all around him, feeling one land on the bare skin of his hand. He looked down at it and saw that it was blue and green and purple, all swirled together in a pattern more complex than could possibly exist in the real world. Phil watched it, mesmerized, until it beat its wings and flew away again. Then he looked up to see the hills around them revealed as simple green grass. The grass had just been so thoroughly covered in innumerable butterflies that no glimpse of the ground beneath had been visible.

Phil turned to look at Dan, who asked excitedly, “Did you like it?”

Phil didn’t know how he could possibly answer that question, so he simply took Dan’s hand and led him to the grassy hillside beside the bench, formerly covered in those magical butterflies, and he pulled Dan down and made love to him there in the grass as the sunshine-spangled butterflies continued to fill the sky above them.

Afterward, as they lay in each other’s arms, Dan spoke quietly into Phil’s neck. “My name is Dan. In the real world. Daniel Howell. For when you come find me someday.” He pulled away to look into Phil’s face and smiled softly. “My name is Dan.”

Phil simply stared at him, filled with pain. Dan stroked his hands through Phil’s hair, fingers sending delicious tingles along his scalp, and whispered, “I know you’re scared. I understand. But will you tell me one thing about yourself in the real world? Just one thing?”

Phil rolled onto his back to gaze up into the blue sky where some butterflies still drifted here and there, and he said sadly, “You wouldn’t like the way I look. I have … my hair is mousy brown, and my eyes are weird, and my nose is like a beak.” He hoped that didn’t give too much away. If Dan guessed … this would all end.

“I think you’re beautiful,” Dan insisted, and then he pressed kisses to Phil’s eyelids and cheeks and lips and chin. “I don’t care what you look like. I already know you’re beautiful, because I know you, and  **you**  are beautiful. None of the rest of it matters.”

But Phil knew it did.

* * *

Another night, as they lay utterly relaxed and sated in each other’s arms, Dan announced, “I want to take you on a date. A proper date.”

Phil laughed into Dan’s bare shoulder. “A date? In our dreams?”

Dan nodded. “Yes. A date. A proper date. What would be your ideal first date?” And he watched Phil’s face expectantly.

Phil grinned and thought. Then he snickered. “My perfect first date would be having pancakes. I love pancakes.”

Dan raised an eyebrow. “Just having pancakes?”

Phil nodded. “Yup. Pancakes.” Then he added, “On the moon.” And he giggled.

The world around them warped and shifted in the way that had been familiar to Phil since those early days of childhood, and then he found himself still in Dan’s arms, but they were now both fully clothed in rather smart shirts and trousers, and the ground they lay on was white and silver and … sort of squishy.

Dan pulled him up by the hand when he stood, and directed Phil toward a red-and-white gingham picnic blanket that lay not far off, with a very traditional wicker picnic hamper sitting on it. The sight was bizarre when the landscape around them was all glowing a kind of white and silver that made the best snowy Christmas back home seem drab in comparison. The sky above their heads was a deep blue filled with not only stars but also planets and brightly-colored clouds and swirls of heavenly matter.

Phil pointed to a particularly vivid cluster of light and asked with wonder, “Is that the Crab Nebula?”

Dan preened. “I thought you would like it.”

Phil turned to stare at him. “But you can’t see the Crab Nebula from the moon! Or … any of these planets, either! Or … is that … is that a quasar?”

“I knew you would like it! And I can make it anything I want. Anything that makes us happy, that makes  **you**  happy. And you love it, right?” Dan had his hands clenched together as if uncertain of Phil’s reaction.

“Are you insane?” Phil asked, his eyes literally filled with the reflections of millions of stars, and wrapped Dan in his arms, squeezing him so tight that he noticed the other man gasp a little for breath. Phil loosened his grip a bit and pulled away enough to be able to look into Dan’s face. “Yes, I love it. Of course I love it! It’s … the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen! I love it, and I love  **you**. Always. Always and always and always.”

Dan grinned and grabbed his hand, leading him toward the picnic blanket, “Now, about those pancakes.”

Phil laughed, shaking his head in absolute overwhelmed wonder.

“Oh,” Dan added, glancing back at Phil as they walked, “and the moon itself is made of marshmallow. So you can eat pieces of that, too, if you want.”

* * *

During their waking hours, Phil found it more and more difficult to hold himself back. He’d become so close to Dan in their dreams, had gotten to know him body and soul with such thorough and reciprocal reverence, that it felt absolutely unnatural to keep his distance. His hands itched to wrap around Dan’s waist, to pull him close. His lips vividly remembered the feel of Dan’s and longed to feel their touch again.

At rehearsals, at meals, just chatting with members of the crew or sitting around on the tour bus staring at their laptops … he knew he watched Dan too much. He knew his eyes probably gave too much away.

He’d noticed Dan sending him confused glances filled with emotions Phil couldn’t read. Sometimes even onstage during the show, the chemistry seemed stronger than it had been before their dream relationship had become so intense.

Sometimes he woke to find Dan lying beside him in the morning light, just gazing at him with uncertainty and a sort of perplexed contemplation. But Dan always immediately rolled out of the bed and left the room.

* * *

The treehouse had become their sanctuary, and Phil often found himself there when he first entered what he no longer thought of as “shadow dreams” and now thought of as “Dan dreams.”

The floors of the treehouse were scattered with large cushions, very convenient for sitting or lying around talking … or for more physically vigorous pursuits. Tonight was a night for talking, though, and Dan had been irritatingly persistent. They lay in each other’s arms, hands slowly stroking each other’s skin in an occasionally very distracting way, but Dan wouldn’t let the topic go.

“I already know I love you,” he reasoned. “It won’t matter what you look like. I told you—we’re soulmates. I’ll love you no matter what.” He sounded so certain. He had no idea.

Phil stroked his hands along Dan’s smooth back and argued, “Then why does it matter? Why do you care so much what I look like?”

Dan arched against him and smiled. “Well, I’ll obviously have to know when we meet, when we can finally be together. I mean, unless you plan to wear a mask the rest of our lives.” Dan chuckled.

Phil didn’t say anything, but his hands went still.

The silence went on far too long.

“Wait.” Dan’s voice was barely a breath. A tiny, vulnerable exhalation.

Phil could feel Dan’s slowly growing distress, a mixture of hurt and confusion, and he felt it almost like a physical pain in his own chest.

“Wait.” If possible, Dan’s voice had grown even smaller.

Phil waited, still silent, frozen. He offered no comfort. How could he?

Dan’s feelings expanded, magnified, extended into a helpless sort of despair as understanding dawned. “You don’t … you don’t want to be with me.” Phil made a sound of disagreement and tried to pull Dan closer, but Dan rolled away to stare at him with a face of heartbreaking betrayal.

Dan’s eyes were like dark holes in his face, black and empty and lost. “You don’t ever want to be with me in the real world. Not  **ever**.” His voice sounded hollow.

“Why can’t we just have this?” Phil asked plaintively, trying to pull Dan into his arms again.

“Because we’re meant to be together,” Dan wailed, and the entire dream world seemed to waver with his anguish. “I’ve always known it! Don’t you feel it? I know it isn’t just me. I  **know**  you feel it. Why … why don’t you want to be with me?” Dan’s voice had become gradually softer and softer, so that Phil could barely hear him whisper at last, “Why don’t you want me for real?”

Dan had finally gone limp with emotional exhaustion and let himself be held now, but his tears burned Phil’s skin like acid, like they would eat through his very flesh and bone and through the floor of the treehouse and through the very fabric of the dream that held them together.

“I do want you!” Phil insisted, horrified. “You know how much I love you—we can feel what the other feels, so you have to know how much I love and want you! It’s just … you won’t want  **me**. Not out there. I just don’t want to lose this. I don’t want to lose the bit of you I get to have. So please … please, Dan … please don’t ask for more than this. Please don’t take this away from me.  **Please**.” Phil’s own tears flowed. They were both crying now.

“I  **will**  want you,” Dan insisted quietly. “I will  **always**  want you. No matter what. I just wish you could trust that.” His tears had not slowed, but his voice now held more blank resignation than burning agony. “I wish you could trust  **me**.”

Phil held him tightly, stroking his hands along whatever planes and curves of Dan’s body he could reach, running his hands through Dan’s hair, pressing soft kisses to his cheek and neck. “I do trust you,” he murmured desperately. “Just … can we just be together for now? Can I just be here with you and love you and not fight?” He continued gently caressing Dan’s skin in a way he hoped was reassuring and calming.

Dan didn’t feel calm to him, though—he just felt sad. Defeated. Abandoned. Empty. Alone. Phil didn’t want him to feel any of those things! Why was this all going wrong despite all his efforts? If he could only make Dan happy again, then they could be together, and it would be so lovely, so beautiful, so wonderful, just like before. He just had to try! Try to make Dan happy again!

Dan lay limply atop him now, their bare skin pressed together and Dan’s fringe hanging down to tickle Phil’s skin. Phil hummed absently, something soothing, some tune from one of the Final Fantasy games, as he stroked Dan’s silky hair back again and again. “I love your hair,” he murmured tenderly. Dan seemed to be coming back to himself the tiniest amount as Phil ran his fingers through the straight brown strands over and over again, murmuring affectionate nonsense. “I love it even more when you leave it curly.”

Dan’s body immediately went rigid, and Phil realized his mistake at the exact same moment.

Dan’s dream projection of himself  **always**  had straightened hair.

Phil jerked awake as if he’d fallen off a cliff and found himself staring into Dan’s shocked brown eyes from only inches away in the tour bus bed.

Phil was on his feet and out of the room before Dan had a chance to say anything at all. He stood in the kitchenette, trying to slow his panicked breathing, his fingers clenched around the edge of the countertop, hoping against hope that Dan hadn’t figured it out, but knowing that was stupid. He’d seen it in Dan’s eyes for that split second before he’d bolted.

Dan knew it was him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you as always to my phenomenally wonderful patrons: @itsjustmestef, @jorzuela, @obv10usly, and @semolinacello!


	9. Loyalty and Betrayal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So now Dan knows...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again to my friends who read this chapter in advance and gave me their thoughts on it. You guys are the best!

The kitchenette and lounge area was silent except for the sound of the bus engine and tires on the road beneath them, neither of which Phil could hear over the pounding of his own heart. Eyes squeezed shut tightly, he tried to hold back tears.

It would all be over now.

He hadn’t closed the door to the bedroom when he ran out, but Dan had not followed him or even shouted any well-deserved obscenities. What was Dan thinking right now? Was he still lying there in the bed, disgusted that the person he’d thought he loved was actually Phil? Was he remembering the dreams they’d shared and seeing it all differently now that he knew? Was he hating Phil for not telling him?

Was their friendship even going to survive this? How could it? How could it **possibly**?

He had ruined everything. Nothing could ever be the same. They’d have to finish the tour, of course, but after that …

Phil bit his lip and let his head droop, leaning heavily back against the counter. He looked over at the narrow sofa. He could probably sleep there. It might be more comfortable than the cramped, cement-hard bunks. And tomorrow … he didn’t want to think about the conversation they would have to have tomorrow. But they obviously wouldn’t be sharing the bedroom again.

He heard a noise to his left and turned to see Dan, hair a riot of sleep-tossed curls, holding onto the sides of the doorway as he emerged from the bedroom. Phil couldn’t read the expression in his eyes. In their dreams, they read each other’s thoughts and feelings so easily, but here in the real world, Dan was often a complete mystery. Never so much as right now. But Phil was fairly certain he knew some of what was going on behind those unreadable brown eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Phil hurried to say. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I know you don’t feel that way about me in real life, and I was … I was being selfish…”

Dan took a step nearer, trailing a hand on the wall to keep himself stable in the moving vehicle. “It was you, all this time? All these years, it was **you**?” Dan’s voice was low.

Phil nodded miserably. “I didn’t know, though! I didn’t know until you showed me what you look like! I swear I didn’t know. Not until … you know … these past couple weeks…” He flushed with the guilt of admitting how he’d abused Dan’s trust, how he’d taken advantage of the dream world to have what he couldn’t have when they were awake. All the things they’d done since he figured it out. God, Dan would hate him for that.

Dan took another step, eyes hooded and intense. “It was you,” he repeated slowly.

Still unsure what exactly was going through Dan’s mind, Phil rushed to apologize again. “I know you don’t want me like that, not really, and I shouldn’t have…” But Phil’s next words emerged as only a stunned, truncated breath as Dan grabbed him, long body slamming Phil hard against the edge of the counter while one hand fisted in Phil’s t-shirt and the other wrapped around the back of Phil’s neck to pull him into a blazing kiss.

Phil’s stunned mind went completely blank, unable to process this utterly impossible turn of events, but his body reacted instinctively, kissing Dan back with equal passion.

It had never felt like this in their dreams. Everything they had done together, all the times they had kissed or made love … that had been their dream selves, and there had been an incredible emotional intimacy to their ability to always know how the other was feeling … but the actual physical sensation of Dan’s body moving against him, pushing against him so hard that Phil was pushed up to half-sitting on the counter now, the feel of Dan’s short fingernails biting into the skin of Phil’s neck with the strength of his grip, the heat and wet of Dan’s mouth as their lips and tongues nearly attacked each other … nothing in the dreams had been like this.

Nothing in his entire **life** had been like this.

Phil had no idea what was going on. Dan was angry with him, right? He’d betrayed Dan’s trust. Dan didn’t want him, not in the real world, and now that he knew that dream Phil was real Phil, he wouldn’t want either of them.

So … was Dan … was this some kind of punishment? Some kind of angry sex kind of thing? Phil had never **had** angry sex, but he knew it was a **thing** , knew it happened. He really hoped that wasn’t what was going to happen now.

Even if it had all been based on a lie, he didn’t want to taint those few memories he had of loving Dan in their dreams. He wanted to hang on to those memories forever.

Especially once Dan was … gone. Because he knew Dan would leave now.

Except that Dan wasn’t leaving. Not yet. He was doing rather the opposite of leaving, actually … though Phil supposed the actual opposite of leaving would be coming, and neither of them was literally coming … not yet … though the way Dan was rubbing against him was definitely pushing him down the start of that road.

Phil pulled his mouth away to gasp, “I know you’re mad about …”

But Dan’s hand tightened on the back of Phil’s neck and pulled him closer, his other hand letting go of Phil’s t-shirt and sliding up into Phil’s hair where he got a firm grasp that pulled slightly, sending shivers down Phil’s spine. Dan’s hot breath panted against Phil’s lips, “Jesus, Phil! Whatever it is, I’m sure I’ll be mad about it later. But right now … Phil … I have literally been waiting for this my entire life! So just…” And then his mouth was on Phil’s again, his fingers desperate on Phil’s neck and hair, his body pressing and rubbing and pushing against Phil, little desperate noises sounding in the back of his throat…

And Phil just lost control. One arm went up the back of Dan’s sleep t-shirt to slide a hand against the smooth bare skin along his spine, while the other went to his head, where he twined his fingers into Dan’s hobbit hair, cradling Dan’s skull as their kiss went on and on and on. Phil’s arm up Dan’s shirt slipped down to wrap around his waist, holding him tight like he might vanish at any moment, because this moment felt more unreal than anything that had ever happened in his dreams and he worried that this itself might be a cruel dream … a dream about Dan … about what he **wished** he had with Dan … but not an **actual** Dan dream in which Dan was **actually** present. Because why would Dan, Dan in the real world, Dan who **knew** this was actually Phil … why would Dan kiss him like this?

But Phil selfishly let himself sink into it, let himself believe the lie, let himself imagine that this was real, that Dan really felt this way about him, that Dan really felt this desperate need to be close, to hold him, to kiss him, to … oh god that felt good…

“We should get back to the bedroom.” Dan’s voice sounded rough like gravel, like nothing Phil had ever heard from him before.

Phil pulled away sharply enough that Dan’s hands lost their grasp on his neck and hair as Phil wedged his hands between them to press against Dan’s chest. “No,” Phil said firmly. “I know you don’t want this with me, not with the real me, and I’m not going to … it would hurt too much afterward if I let myself pretend. If I let myself act on…” He trailed away, eyes dropping to stare fixedly at the floor. “I know it was only in the dreams, Dan. And bringing the sex part into the real world when I know you don’t feel …” He couldn’t bring himself to use the word “love.” It just hurt too much. “I know you don’t feel the same way about me here as you did in the dreams. And now that you know it’s me, I understand that things will have to change…”

“Well, fucking **obviously** ,” Dan replied in a voice that said he considered Phil a complete imbecile.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you as soon as I figured it out,” Phil told the floor of the tour bus at which he could not stop staring. Meeting Dan’s eyes right now would gut him, so he avoided it as long as possible. “I knew you would want to stop, and I just … I wanted … I wanted to hang on to it as long as I could. I hoped you would never find out, but you kept asking questions, and I…”

Still staring fixedly at the floor in the dimly lit room, Phil thought he heard a frown in Dan’s voice when he said, “Wait. You think … you think I don’t want you?”

Phil gestured awkwardly at himself. “I know I’m not what you probably imagined. And you’ve never shown any interest, any sign of being attracted to me, so I don’t want this as some sort of extension of the dreams. Now that you know, now that you know it’s me, I know it has to end.” He finally looked up and met Dan’s eyes, and it felt like the bravest thing he’d ever done. He made sure his voice didn’t shake when he said firmly, “I know the dreams can’t go on. Let alone this, whatever this was. I don’t know what you were trying to do…”

“I was trying to get your fucking clothes off and do what I’ve only been dreaming about,” Dan growled. Literally growled, like if a tiger could talk. He sounded dangerous and predatory.

Phil shook his head. “I won’t be a stand-in for that dream person you fell in love with. I’m me. And now you know it. This can’t go on. Surely you see that.” Why was Dan dragging this out? Why must he persist in trying to use Phil as some kind of … some kind of physical embodiment of the person he had loved, even though he now knew the truth?

Dan stepped away, leaving Phil to slide back off the counter and back onto his feet. Relief surged through Phil as he accepted that it would stop now. It would hurt—god, of course it would hurt—it would hurt for the rest of his life—but not as badly as if they’d gone through with this, with Dan just … using him. With Dan thinking about that imaginary person while using Phil’s body.

Dan marveled quietly, “You really think I don’t want you. That I don’t love you.”

Phil looked into his eyes, firming his courage to do this thing that felt like it tore his heart right out of his chest. “I’m sure you love me in your own way. But … I know you don’t want more than that with me. You’ve made it clear for years. Just because … because something else happened in our dreams … that doesn’t change what’s really going on between us, between you and me, Dan and Phil, in our real lives. I know you just see me as a friend, and that’s okay. I accepted it a long time ago,” Phil lied.

“So … you love me … but you don’t believe that I love you,” Dan said slowly, as if verifying the obvious.

Phil smiled sadly. “Dan, you don’t have to feel guilty. I’m sorry I … I know it’s sort of like I took advantage, continuing with the dreams, letting myself feel … letting you go on believing I was something I’m not … letting you…”

“Okay, then,” Dan said abruptly, interrupting Phil’s apology. “Let’s go to sleep. Now we both know it’s you and it’s me. And in the dreams we can each sense how the other feels, right? So let’s go to sleep. And I’ll show you how I really feel. You’ll be able to know.”

Phil closed his eyes in pain. “You’re really going to make me do this? Make me … make me feel…”

“Yes,” Dan insisted, sounding frustrated and annoyed and angry. “I want us to go to sleep, and I want to come into your dream, and I want you to know absolutely **everything** I feel about you and about learning who you are and about **all** of this.”

Phil bit his lip, humiliating tears welling in his eyes. “If that’s what you need to do. To … pay me back for what I did … or whatever. To … I don’t know if you want revenge for how I lied to you or what, but … if you need that, I’ll do it. I don’t know how I’m going to fall asleep right now, but I’ll try.” If Dan needed it, he’d do it. He owed him that much at least.

* * *

They climbed back into the bed together, not touching. Dan absolutely radiated waves of anger that Phil could feel even without their dream connection. He cringed on his side of the bed, curling into a fetal position and staring sightlessly at the wall he could barely see in the glimmers of light that occasionally made their way through the gaps in the curtains. He lay there a long time, hating himself for all the ways he’d betrayed Dan’s trust, preparing to feel the full brunt of Dan’s disgust, preparing even to feel nothing … if Dan actually shut him out entirely. That would hurt the most, if even in his dreams he couldn’t feel Dan anymore. But it seemed like the most probable outcome.

He watched flickers of faint light occasionally appear and disappear on the wall. He heard Dan’s steady breathing behind him and wondered how Dan could have fallen asleep so easily after that confrontation, wondered if Dan awaited him in the dream, wondered what the dreamscape would look like when (or if) Phil arrived. He doubted it would be the field of cornflowers or the cushion-strewn treehouse. He pictured rapidly flowing lava, flaming meteors raining from the sky, earthquakes, rabid horses stampeding toward him, sure to trample him into the lava, and somewhere in the midst of the horror, he drifted into a restless sleep.

* * *

Phil found himself floating in the infinite darkness of space. No cable connected him to a spacecraft … he simply drifted alone in the vast emptiness of outer space, helpless. He wore an astronaut’s space suit, but none of the buttons seemed to do anything when he frantically pressed them, and he knew that he would quickly run out of air in the bubble helmet.

He wondered if Dan was doing this to him on purpose, putting him through a hellishly panicked nightmare, and his heart pounded in his ears. He could feel his breaths growing quick and shallow, and thought he remembered reading that hyperventilation would only make you run out of oxygen even more quickly. The thought made his breath even faster, his mind spinning, his heart pounding louder and louder in his ears, and he felt so very very afraid … and so very very … sorry.

His last thought was that he was sorry he’d done that to Dan, that he’d betrayed him like that. Dan didn’t deserve it. Dan deserved a happy life, and Phil had gone and messed it all up. Couldn’t even be a proper friend.

His heart beat even louder. Pounding. Pounding. Pounding. As if it might burst out of his chest with his panic. But soon it would stop entirely he knew … when he was dead.

He wondered if dying in the dream would mean he died in real life. He pictured Dan waking up to a Phil corpse lying in the tour bus bed next to him, probably no paler than the living Phil had been. How would he explain it to the audience at the next venue? Their fans would be so disappointed. But at least they wouldn’t know the truth about what a terrible person Phil had been, what a terrible friend. They wouldn’t know how horribly he’d mistreated the person he loved most in the entire world. But Dan would know. For the rest of his life, even if Phil wasn’t there, Dan would know.

In those last seconds, with those last gasps of breath, those last deafening poundings of his heart, Phil hoped Dan understood how sorry he was. He hoped he really understood and believed him. And that maybe he might be able to forgive him someday.

Then suddenly the stars around him began to shift in an unnatural way, almost as if they were reaching toward him, and Phil felt something huge wrapping around him, lifting his body so that he was no longer suspended weightless in space. Something … sheltering him. Protecting him.

Saving him.

“Jesus, Phil!” He heard Dan’s voice and understood that it came from the stars. It made sense now. “Melodramatic much?” Phil heard disgust in the tone and wasn’t surprised. Of course Dan was disgusted with him. He’d known that already. “It took forever to find you this time. Were you not reaching out to me at all?”

As Phil found himself deposited upon a grassy hillside in bright summer sunshine, the starry sky that had surrounded him as he suffocated in his astronaut suit shrank and warped and twisted itself into Dan’s dark spangled silhouette, and then into Dan himself, the way he looked in real life, except that his hair was curly. Phil knew it was a strange thing to notice at that moment, but his mind wasn’t working quite right yet. A moment ago, he’d thought he was going to die.

“Your hair … is curly…” Phil murmured in a daze.

“You said you liked it better curly, so … I left it that way.” Dan waved a hand in front of Phil’s face, then snapped his fingers an inch away from Phil’s nose. “Earth to Phil! Don’t you want to talk about how we’ve apparently been in each other’s dreams since forever, or how I tried to drag you off to bed and you blew me off, or how we just had a huge fight in the tour bus, or how you tried to kill yourself in your own nightmare, or how you completely shut me out so that I had to hammer down the doors to get into your dream to save you?” Dan’s looked the most frustrated and annoyed Phil had ever seen him.

“I … shut you out?” Phil asked, confused.

“What the fuck were you trying to do? You can’t lock me out when you have nightmares like that, Phil! You have to leave me a way in so I can help fix it. Haven’t I always helped before?”

Phil stared at Dan’s familiar face, at those brown eyes that looked so clear and almost amber in this bright sunlight. “You’ve helped me with nightmares?”

Dan rolled his eyes. “Well, what do you think? I’d just let you thrash around and suffer on your own? I always found some way to make it better if I could. I mean, maybe you had nightmares times when I was awake and so I couldn’t hear you calling me, but if I was asleep I always came running if I knew you were having a nightmare. Most of the time I didn’t have to actually show up myself … I could just manipulate the world of your dream so it wasn’t so scary.” Dan looked at him oddly. “You really didn’t know I was doing that?”

“I didn’t even know you **could** do that,” Phil stammered, gazing at Dan in awe now. “How many times did you save me?”

Dan’s dismissive shrug seemed to indicate it was probably more times than he could count. “I don’t know. I mean, it started when I was just little…”

Phil interrupted, eyes wide, “You started saving me from my nightmares when you were a little kid?”

Dan frowned. “Well, yeah. I mean, of course. We were **both** kids. But since I could control the dream stuff, I helped out. You did a pretty good job of calling out when you needed me. And you were there when I needed you, too.”

Overwhelmed, Phil lay down flat on his back on the grass, gazing up at the brilliant sky above them. It wasn’t just blue, though. It was a combination of colors: blues and greens and yellows. It seemed familiar, like he’d seen it before, but he knew he’d never seen the sky like that even in his dreams. The sky here was sometimes odd, but this was … different.

“But we can reminisce about old times later,” Dan insisted firmly, turning on his side so that his face looked down into Phil’s own. “I believe we were in the middle of a fight when I suggested we go to sleep to solve it here.”

“A fight?” Phil frowned, trying to remember exactly what the fight had been about, but then he remembered again and cringed. “Right. Because I didn’t tell you. Because I betrayed your trust…”

“No, you moron,” Dan interrupted him impatiently. “The fight about how you didn’t believe that I love you.”

Phil closed his eyes in the dream, not wanting to see Dan’s face above him. “I know you love the me that is in the dreams. It’s just … the me in the real world…”

Dan sighed his heaviest, most put-upon sigh and said, “Yeah, so now I know it’s the same you in the dreams and in the real world. I know it’s **you** , Phil. And you **look** like you.”

Phil opened his eyes and looked down at himself. He couldn’t see his face or hair, but his hands and body looked like his own. And he was wearing his Pixel Pops t-shirt with black jeans. “I guess I did it accidentally,” he apologized.

“I helped,” Dan explained. “I mean, you can make some changes here, but I’m better at it, so I do most of the heavy lifting.” He shrugged as if this was the most normal thing in the world to be talking about. “But you’re getting me off topic again.”

“What topic?” Phil asked, his mind spinning from all the things Dan kept saying, things that made no sense, and yet made things suddenly make so much more sense, things that nobody else would understand, but which the two of them had been living as long as they could remember…

Dan growled. Not a sexy tiger growl this time, just a frustrated growl like when he discovered Phil had eaten his cereal. “The topic of me being in love with you, dimwit!”

“But you’re not. Not with the real me,” Phil objected, trying to be the voice of reason in this completely insane conversation. “Dan, you’ve made it very clear. Painfully clear. For **years**. You’ve always made very certain that I wouldn’t get the wrong idea. I think it’s been even more obvious lately, actually…” Phil began to feel too vulnerable lying on the ground like that, so he sat up so Dan wouldn’t be looming above him anymore, his face so close like that.

“Yeah, well, there’s a good reason for that,” Dan said wryly. “Because I was already in a relationship, and it was getting even more intense, so I had to distance myself from you, from any feelings I might have about you that might be … more than they should be.”

Oh that hurt. So Phil **had** missed something. “I didn’t know you were dating anyone,” he said through numb lips.

“Jesus, you are the densest…” Dan cut himself off, then took a deep breath. “Okay.” He moved so that he was sitting facing Phil directly, looking him right in the eyes, and Phil somehow felt that he couldn’t look away. The intensity of Dan’s eyes held him there, pinned, waiting for the death blow.

“I’ve fallen in love twice in my life,” Dan began slowly, and his eyes were softer now, the brown warmer and richer in the sunshine. That familiar little secret smile was on his lips, the one Phil had been seeing so much lately. “The first time I fell in love was under a rainbow cloak made out of flowers…” Phil’s eyes widened. Dan had been in love with him in their dreams that long? “And the second time I fell in love was at the Manchester train station,” Dan finished.

Phil’s lips parted in shock, his mind reeling.

Dan smiled wryly and explained, “I tried to fight my feelings, though, because my heart wasn’t free. I’d always known that someday I would find the person in my dreams and we would be together. I knew he was out there in the world somewhere, and I knew we were soulmates, and I knew I had to find him eventually so we could spend the rest of our lives together. So when I fell in love again, I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that I could be so disloyal … god, I felt so guilty.” Dan rolled his eyes suddenly and punched Phil in the shoulder. “But it was you both times, you idiot! I fell in love twice, and both times it was you!”

This time Dan was the one who flopped down on his back. “All that time I spent fighting how I felt about you, because I’d already long ago found my perfect match, my permanent someone, my soulmate even though that sounds cheesy as hell, and I wasn’t going to jeopardize that … but fuck! All that angsting I did these past several years! All those efforts at pushing you away, keeping you at a distance! And it was all just **you** the whole fucking time!” He chuckled a sort of low, amazed little sound. “You have no idea what you’ve put me through.”

“What I’ve … put … you … through?” Phil’s words emerged slowly, as if weighed down and bogged down by his confusion, as if his thoughts fought their way through a thick sludge of disbelief.

“We’re in the dream now,” Dan replied calmly, gazing up at the oddly-colored sky, his profile so lovely Phil hurt to look at it. “So you can sense what I feel, right? Well … what do I feel right now, Phil?” A contented little smile, not so secret anymore, curved his lips, though Dan continued to look at the sky instead of at Phil. And when he stopped arguing, stopped assuming, stopped **thinking** … Phil suddenly could feel it all, could feel Dan’s emotions, and they rolled over him like a tide, and they pulled him under, and he rolled with them, and they filled him and ran through him like his own blood and made him whole…

And then he was pressing Dan down into the soft grass under a sky the color of Phil’s own eyes, and he was kissing Dan’s wonderful, delicious, smiling mouth with a lot of tongue and a hint of teeth and every ounce of love he had to give.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just to be clear, this is not the end. I predict two more chapters. :)


	10. Just For Us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What is it like to really be together?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter took a while. Life has been getting in the way of my writing.

“Wait, wait, **WAIT**!” Dan broke away from the kiss and struggled to sit up, pushing Phil to the side, but Phil didn’t misunderstand, didn’t assume he was being rejected, because now he **knew**. He knew how Dan felt, knew it as well as he knew his own heart, and so he simply felt confused at why the hell Dan’s lips were way over **there** when Phil’s lips were way over **here**.

“Wait why?” Phil asked not very eloquently.

“Because I’ve had sex with you lots of times here,” Dan explained. At the sudden rush of memories, Phil felt his stomach clench with the urge to just tackle Dan back onto the grass and stop the unnecessary talking. But now Dan was pushing Phil gently but firmly, a hand pressed to Phil’s chest until he lay flat on the grass with Dan leaning above him.

“I know how you feel here, in our minds, when I’m inside you or you’re inside me or we’re inside each other at the same time—which, pity, we won’t be able to do in the real world—but I have no idea what you feel like or look like or sound like in the real world.” Dan’s voice grew in intensity with each word as Phil lay there and gazed up at him, listening, eager, impatient, confused. ”I want this time to be different. The first time we both know it’s us, you and me, Dan and Phil, the people we are in the real world and the people we are here in this dream world … the first time we’re together now that we know everything … I want it to be … real. Do you know what I mean?”

But Phil didn’t. “We’re just as real here as we are when we’re awake,” he insisted. “Maybe more so. I mean, when we’re awake I can’t feel what you’re feeling, know what you’re thinking. We’re closer here than we can ever be there.”

Dan nodded. “But our bodies are just as real as our hearts and minds. And, I don’t mean to offend your delicate smol bean sensibilities, Phil, but … I’m really looking forward to getting to finally fuck your actual body.”

And Phil could feel it now, could feel how Dan wanted him, could feel it throbbing all around them and between them and within them, overtaking the entire substance and fabric of the dream with its urgency. But Dan wouldn’t stop talking.

“I want to get my hands on your skin.” Dan’s hands roamed as he spoke, sneaking beneath Phil’s t-shirt and along his chest, brushing against his nipples. “Not just how you **imagine** your skin,” he continued as his hands continued their distracting exploration, “or how **I** imagine it, not what your skin feels like in our minds, in our brains, but your **real, actual** skin. I want to see your real eyes when I touch you, lick the real sweat off your real throat, feel your real tongue on my real…”

“Then let’s wake the fuck up,” Phil interrupted, pushed to the brink by Dan’s words.

* * *

He woke with a jolt to find himself in the familiar bed on the tour bus, with the sound of tires against the road, the rumble of the diesel engine, the occasional flickering of light through the curtains.

And, there, in the familiar dim light, Dan’s eyes. Open. Watching him.

And then Dan’s hands. Warm. Gentle. Sliding beneath Phil’s t-shirt, stroking Phil’s belly and chest with slow movements. Slow. Slow. So **painfully** slow, as if he were savoring these first touches because there would never be another first time for this.

Phil tried not to push, not to hurry, as he could tell that’s what Dan wanted. Even without being able to read his thoughts, he could still read what Dan wanted simply from the way his hands moved, the way his lips pressed so gently against Phil’s neck, the way Dan touched him only with lips and hands, the rest of his body still held apart though so near in the bed.

But Phil had wanted this for too long, and eventually he couldn’t give Dan what he wanted anymore, couldn’t keep it slow, and suddenly the duvet was on the floor and then so were their sleep clothes, and Phil pressed Dan into the mattress, their whole bodies touching skin to skin, their muscles moving against each other, tongues tasting, hands stroking and grasping and clutching, breaths heaving and combining and sounding together … and maybe he **was** giving Dan what he wanted after all.

* * *

The next morning Phil woke to find himself alone in the bed. He groped around for his glasses, then eyed the disaster that was the bedroom. After some rather extensive searching, he found his pajamas and put them on, then at least threw the duvet over the bed to hide some of the evidence of the night’s vigorous activities.

He walked carefully out to the lounge area, bumping into the hallway walls occasionally when the bus moved unexpectedly in traffic. Dan was sitting at the table, eating a bowl of cereal, but he looked up when Phil appeared. He chewed and swallowed, then watched Phil with a whisper of a smile flirting around his mouth.

Phil casually leaned against the cabinets in the kitchenette and winced. He remembered Dan’s forcefulness the previous night. He was feeling kind of embarrassed, and kind of awkward, and kind of turned on. He tried to play it cool. “I’m going to have an impressive bruise on my butt from where you pushed me against this counter, you know.”

Dan raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying it wasn’t worth it?” He abandoned his cereal bowl to stand up and walk toward where Phil waited.

When he got close enough, Phil wrapped an arm around Dan’s neck and pulled him in for a long, thorough kiss. “Totally worth it,” he murmured against Dan’s lips. Dan grinned, and then they kissed again. A lot. And it’s possible that Dan got pressed against the counter hard enough to acquire some bruises of his own.

* * *

“Remember that time we explored those tunnels, and those trolls tried to kill us?”

“Yeah. Jeez. I was around … I don’t know … 9 then.” Phil thought a moment. “So you were 5 when we did that? When we had that dream?”

Dan nodded blissfully, his fingers restless on Phil’s bare chest, right over his heart. His smile was sweet and Phil just wanted to kiss it, but he also wanted to talk, because this entire situation seemed literally incredible. “I didn’t know much about trolls,” Dan murmured as he continued to caress Phil’s chest, “but I used ideas I got from your thoughts to help. I mean, I always did that. The dreams are always part you and part me.”

“When was the first time?” Phil asked, suddenly intensely curious. “The first time you came into my dreams.”

Dan raised his head off the pillow to stare at Phil in surprise. “You should know better than I would!”

Phil frowned. “Why?”

Dan shook his head and chuckled, laying his head back down. “Because you’re older, you spoon. I was probably just a baby.”

Phil gaped. He sat up and just stared at Dan in disbelief for a long moment.

Still lying mussed and drowsy among the tangled sheets, Dan smiled up at him. “You’ve been calling to me my whole life, Phil.” He raised a hand to brush against Phil’s cheek, then lightly against his lips. “I was probably trying to get to you when I was still a fetus.”

Phil lay down again, lying on his back and staring up at the tour bus ceiling. “I think … I think you were just a light at first.” He tried his best to remember, but it was so long ago. “This little light that would … you would sort of follow me around … and lead me places…”

“I just always knew you, always felt you reaching out to me, my whole life. And I just always knew that someday I’d find out where you actually lived, and we would meet, and we would be best friends. Because you were already my best friend. Since … well … forever.” Dan shrugged and kissed Phil’s shoulder.

Phil shook his head in wonder. “And you just … accepted it? Didn’t you ever wonder why this was happening? I mean … this isn’t **normal** , Dan. People don’t just appear in each other’s dreams like that…”

Dan shrugged again, a relaxed smile on his face, his eyes closed. “We did. That’s all that matters. I never really worried about it. I just wanted to find you. And now I did.” He opened his eyes and glanced over at Phil, smiled a little more brightly, and then lay back down again, seeming almost bonelessly relaxed.

Phil started rambling about his Gran, and about the Skill, and about how Dan must have the Skill, too, and what that might mean … but Dan didn’t really seem to be listening very closely. He just hummed occasionally in response, or nodded, but he didn’t seem to be giving the topic the serious consideration it deserved.

“Aren’t you listening to me?” Phil demanded.

Dan opened his eyes and gazed at Phil with eyes softer than Phil had ever seen them. “Aren’t **you** listening to **me**? The how and why don’t matter to me. All I know is that I’ve been wanting you my whole life, and now I have you. You are never getting rid of me, Phil Lester. I’ve been hunting you for more than 20 years, and I am never letting go.” He pressed a gentle kiss to Phil’s pouting lips and said, “Maybe I have some kind of power. Maybe you have some kind of power. And maybe each of us have this particular power because it’s what we needed to find each other, to bring us together. If you hadn’t called to me, if I hadn’t known you in my dreams, if I hadn’t always had you to turn to, to trust and love and understand, my whole entire life … I might have grown up to be a different person. I might not have grown up to be the person you’re in love with now.” His cheeks got a bit pink and he avoided Phil’s gaze.

Phil realized Dan was embarrassed. While Dan had been using the “L word” fairly liberally, Phil hadn’t been quite as forthcoming. Maybe he’d gotten too good at trying to hide his feelings, being around Dan every day and not wanting to scare him away or reveal too much.

“I **am** in love with you,” Phil said firmly, leaning up on an elbow to look down into Dan’s face. “Jeez, Dan, I’ve been in love with you since before I even thought you were **real**! And when I realized that it was you … I just … I was so sure you didn’t feel that way about **me**.”

Dan raised a hand to push Phil’s fringe back from his forehead. “That must have sucked. I hadn’t really thought about it, but … that must have been really rough. I always knew you existed, that you were real, that I loved you and you loved me, and that we would find each other and be together … but if you thought I already knew you in real life and didn’t feel that way…” Dan looked sad now, and Phil didn’t want that.

“It’s okay,” he interrupted, trying to smile. It really hadn’t felt okay at all, but he didn’t want Dan to hurt on his behalf.

Dan let his hand slide gently down to stroke Phil’s cheek, his eyes soft. “I’m sure it wasn’t okay. I’m sure it hurt. I’m sorry I hurt you, even if I had no idea I was doing it.” He brushed his fingers across Phil’s lips and promised solemnly, “I’ll never hurt you again if I can help it.”

Phil felt tears well in his eyes but fought to maintain some amount of composure. “Now that I know you’re you, the you from my dreams, my shadow, the person I’ve trusted and loved since I can remember … I know you’re right. Whatever this was, however this happened, it happened to bring us together.”

Suddenly, Dan chuckled, which jolted Phil a bit, as he’d been in the midst of a soppy moment of cheesy sentimentality. Dan leaned up to kiss him, then explained, “We were trying to find each other in our dreams, but apparently the world—or the Skill or whatever—lost patience with us. So we found each other in the real world, too. You called me so strongly … I came to you twice. I hounded you online until you let me in, just like you let me into your dreams.”

The idea had never occurred to Phil, and he lay down again, considering. It really did feel like Fate, like he and Dan had been meant to find each other, like maybe this was why he’d had this Skill all along. He wondered what his Gran would have thought of all this, and he liked to think she would have been happy for him.

“I always liked that field of cornflowers,” Dan mused dreamily, his eyes closed again, that blissful smile on his face. “I remember curling up with you there once when my dad had been yelling at me and I was feeling sad, but being with you made everything better.”

Phil smiled to himself. “Was that the time you looked like a red fox?” and Dan nodded. He opened one eye to look at Phil.

“I was hoping you would pet me, but you put your arm around me and held me close in that field of cornflowers, and I felt safe … and that was enough. I was really little then.”

Phil didn’t know what to say, thinking about small Dan hurting from harsh words and turning to him in their dreams for comfort. And Dan always helping him with his nightmares. He wished he’d done more for Dan.

“I called you the flower boy, you know. Because there always seemed to be flowers when you were around. Flowers in the grass, and in the trees, and in that cloak you made…” Dan’s voice had grown quieter and slower, as if he might actually be falling asleep.

“I called you the shadow,” Phil replied softly. “Well, the shadow boy when we were kids, but then just the shadow when we got older.”

Dan opened his eyes again and turned his head to look at Phil, and it was a look Phil hoped to see every day for the rest of his life. He’d seen it in his dreams, but he’d never thought he’d ever see someone look at him like that in the real world. “I called you the flower boy when we were young,” Dan murmured, “but when we got older … I just thought of you as mine.”

* * *

They didn’t usually have very much free time on the road, but when they found themselves with an entire day free before their Oakland show, they hired a taxi and saw as much of the San Francisco area as they could. It was ridiculously expensive, hiring a cab driver to chauffeur them around all day long, but they’d looked at each other that morning and just known.

They had to get out.

Escape.

With so much of their time spent on the tour bus or in the venues, rehearsing even when they weren’t performing, they just needed some time away from it all! There were only 10 more days, 10 days and they’d be done, the tour would be over, but right now 10 days seemed like forever.

So like the little boys they once had been, they ran away. Just for a day. Playing hooky.

They rode up and down steep San Francisco hills in their yellow cab, and they saw sea lions who’d taken over an entire pier, and they bought touristy jumpers to keep them warm in the deceptively sunny California weather, and they ate some clam chowder in a bread bowl, and they stood on the Golden Gate Bridge watching sailboats far below, and they even walked among some giant redwood trees. Staring upward in awe, Dan joked, “Finally, we’re in the company of giants taller than us!”

Phil said, “Now we know how our fans feel at the meet-and-greets,” and then wondered if they would be taller than redwoods in their dreams that night.

At the end of the day, Phil’s photographer friend pulled him aside, looking uncomfortable. “You’ll want to look through today’s shots and decide which ones are … all right,” he suggested, not meeting Phil’s eyes.

Confused, Phil asked, “Why? Was there a problem with the camera?”

Davy shuffled his feet a bit before finally meeting Phil’s gaze and beginning awkwardly, “The way you two were looking at each other…”

Phil nodded quickly. “Oh. Right.” He didn’t know what else to say.

Apparently, they would need to be more careful. He hated it, but knew it was true. Especially on the tour, with eyes on them everywhere, they rarely got a moment’s privacy. Except in the tour bus bedroom.

He couldn’t wait to be home, home where he could look at Dan however he liked in the lounge and in the kitchen and in the bath—his mind wandered a bit for a moment there—and in the bloody cupboard if they wanted.

But for now they would need to be circumspect.

But at least in the dreams they were free.

* * *

That night Phil appeared as he often did, alone in an unfamiliar landscape, surrounded by green and … yes, there were flowers there, too, both in the grass and in the trees. Was Dan going to appear as a flower tonight? Or a redwood tree? Or would he look like himself? Over the decades of their dream relationship, Phil had come to adore Dan’s capriciousness in this regard. It made every dream almost like a scavenger hunt. Where’s Dan this time?

The blue sky above began to darken, and Phil stepped further into the clearing to get a better view. He saw that clouds were gathering. Something about the clouds seemed … he stared upward … “Dan, is that you?” Phil asked with a grin.

He felt Dan’s chuckle deep inside him, in his chest or his heart or some non-physical part of him that only existed in his dreams, and then he could tell that Dan wanted him to join him. “I don’t know how to be a cloud,” Phil pouted.

“Sure you do,” Dan replied, “with a little help…”

And then suddenly Phil was a cloud. It felt strange, like he existed simultaneously as himself—a singular identity—but also as a dispersed collection of particles. Dan, as always in their dreams, could read his thoughts pretty well. “We’re all just collections of particles all the time,” he pointed out. “That’s what our bodies are. Being a cloud just makes it more obvious, because we can do this…”

Phil had watched clouds a lot when he was young. He’d loved to lie on the grass and just stare up at the sky, watching the clouds drift into each other and apart, forming shapes and then changing into new ones. He’d never before thought about any of it from the cloud’s perspective.

He and Dan began to merge, their cloud particles mixing even as their individual consciousnesses remained separate. Dan drifted slowly, gently, into Phil, and they formed some new shape that wasn’t just Dan and wasn’t just Phil but was something new they’d created together while still being themselves at the same time. He could see the particles of Dan’s cloud as distinct from himself, and yet they mingled with each other.

In a way, it felt a bit like the emotional side of sex without the physical sensations, the emotional merging without the sweaty push and pull and tight and …

“Ready to jump?” Dan asked, and Phil felt confused, knowing that Dan would sense his questioning. “Come with me!”

And then Dan and Phil were thousands of raindrops, falling from the sky, falling beside and among each other, each seeing themselves reflected in the watery spheres of the other. They fell with a fearless joy, scattered together into tiny drops of themselves that accompanied and reflected every other facet of themselves and of each other. It was like seeing himself and Dan through a molecular-level kaleidoscope as they raced toward the ground in a shower made of both their consciousnesses.

It was the most bizarre and beautiful thing Phil had ever experienced. He wondered if Dan would ever stop surprising and amazing him.

As they reached the ground, their droplets drew together and reformed into an adult Dan and an adult Phil, and within moments they looked like themselves again, with Dan grinning like a child on Christmas morning. But Phil glanced upward and held his hands out, palms facing up, as the rain had turned to tiny ice crystals.

It was snowing.

He looked at Dan and marveled, “It never snowed in our dreams before. We’ve been having dreams together for more than 20 years, and we never had snow. Why now?”

Dan stepped close and pulled Phil into his arms. “Because now I know it’s you. And I know that real-world Phil loves snow. That’s something I didn’t know about you in our dreams. But now I know you both ways, and so now I know that you love snow, and I can bring it to you here.”

Snowflakes fell on their hair, and one hit Phil in the eye, making him blink quickly. He gazed at Dan in wonder, arms looped around his waist. “Why do you think there was never snow before? I mean, just even by accident.”

Dan shrugged in his embrace. “I think you were just so … warm. I always felt so safe and warm when I was with you … snow just didn’t happen. Flowers did.”

* * *

Three more performances and they would be on their way home. The tour had been great—it still **was** great— **of course** it was great! But privacy was dramatically underrated.

They lay pressed together on the extremely narrow sofa in the tour bus’s lounge. It really wasn’t wide enough for even one of them to get truly comfortable, but they had shown remarkable persistence and determination, and had somehow managed to get them both to fit.

They weren’t even kissing when Martyn opened the door. They’d locked it— **of course** they’d locked it!—but Martyn had a key. Of course he had a key. He could come in any time. Why in the world would it ever be inappropriate for him to come in unannounced?

Well, he probably had the answer to that question now.

Dan rolled off the sofa in a panic and made a rather loud thump when he hit the floor, followed by a quieter, muttered, “Ow.” He sat up, looking at Martyn, then turned to look at Phil who still lay frozen on the sofa. Dan looked frightened.

Phil smiled hesitantly at his brother. “Um … surprise?”

Martyn leaned in the doorway for a moment, looking down at the steps and his shoes, and Phil worried what he might be thinking. But when Martyn looked up, Phil saw that he was actually chuckling.

“ **Finally?** ” Martyn asked in a voice flooded with disbelief.

Dan sat up straighter, though his position on the floor made the gesture less dignified than he probably would have hoped. “Finally?” he asked, his tone brittle.

Martyn just shook his head fondly. “Corn and I have been waiting for you two to figure it out for ages. I guess it just took a few thousand miles, a couple months, and a shared bed to open your eyes.”

Dan turned to look at Phil and they both just goggled. Almost in unison, they both turned back to look at Martyn. He was grinning.

Phil grinned back. And, almost like in the dreams, he could feel that Dan was grinning, too.

* * *

It was much more comfortable than the tour bus sofa. They lay in each other’s arms in the field of cornflowers, completely naked, but somehow the greenery in their dreams never prickled or tickled or poked them in uncomfortable places. Instead, Phil lay on a cushiony bed of smooth green grasses, gazing up at the vivid blue cornflowers that waved above their heads and the paler blue sky beyond. Dan lay beside him, stroking a hand along his skin, then raising that hand to twine his fingers through Phil’s hair. It felt like heaven.

“Hey,” Dan whispered suddenly. He sounded excited, and yet uncertain, keeping his voice hushed despite the obvious thrill that ran through him. Phil could feel it along his own nerves like sparks. “Can I try something? Can I … can I change something about how you look?”

Phil jerked his body away immediately, hurt more than he would have imagined possible. He’d thought he’d gotten over this, that Dan had convinced him, but really … he’d still always known it. He’d known that Dan couldn’t love him the way he really was, the Phil he was in reality, plain Phil, odd-looking Phil …

But Dan’s arms wound around him to hold him fast. “No. It’s not what you think. I’ve just always wondered … what you would look like…”

Phil’s body still as stone, he closed himself off as much as possible and prodded ruthlessly, “Yeah? What have you always wondered? What have you always wanted to change about me?”

Dan didn’t release him, but he did let his eyes wander up to Phil’s hair. Phil could feel Dan’s longing to touch, and he relaxed slightly. Dan felt his muscle tension go down a notch and took the chance of letting his hands wander up into Phil’s hair again.

“I’ve just always wondered what you would look like … with your real hair color,” Dan admitted in a whisper, and Phil could feel how apprehensive he was about Phil’s possible reaction, but the idea just made Phil smile, and his body relaxed in Dan’s arms.

“It isn’t very exciting,” Phil shrugged, embarrassed. “Just sort of mousy brown. Just as plain as the rest of me. The only thing people ever seemed to notice was my eyes. So I thought darker hair would emphasize the light eyes, you know?”

Dan nudged him. “It only makes your skin look even more pale, you know.”

Phil shrugged again. “Another thing that stands out, I guess. Another thing that makes me less … plain.”

“You aren’t plain,” Dan whispered in his ear, then sucked the lobe into his mouth and gave it a bit of a suck. “You’re the opposite of plain. You are gorgeous and sexy and amazing and I would love to see what you look like with your natural hair color. Do you mind if I … try it out? I mean, I’ve seen enough pictures of you from when you were younger that I can guess what it would look like. And you can help. I’ll keep the haircut the same, but just … lighten the color…”

Phil hid his face in Dan’s shoulder. “Why? Why would you want to see me looking even more boring than usual?”

Dan pushed Phil’s fringe back from his forehead as he seemed to like to do, his fingers sliding through the smooth strands. “I’ve always loved your hair,” Dan reminded Phil. He’d said it often enough over the years, though always in a platonic “I wish my hair looked like that” context. “I just wonder what you really look like. The unadulterated you. The you without any hiding, without any disguise, without any masks.”

With a pained sigh, Phil nodded, face still buried against Dan’s neck. “Fine. You can do it. You’re just going to be disappointed, though. It’s going to look terrible.”

When he raised his face to meet Dan’s eyes, Dan smiled at him. “You still look like you. You’re still stunningly phenomenally gorgeously amazing Phil.”

Phil rolled his eyes, but couldn’t help smiling a little. “I’m sure I look like a complete idiot.”

“Here,” Dan said. “It’ll be like when we were kids. I’ll show you what you look like.” And his face and body changed until he looked like Phil … if Phil had the most boring-colored hair in the entire universe.

Phil threw his hands up to cover his eyes. “Don’t make me look! It’s hideous!” He was only half joking. He’d grown rather attached to his black-haired persona, enough that his natural hair color no longer looked natural to him.

Dan changed back to looking like himself, though he kept the wavy hair that Phil had gotten used to in their dreams. Dan never straightened his hair in their dreams anymore. Suddenly, a devious look appeared on Dan’s face and Phil cursed how well they could read each other’s thoughts in their dreams.

“If I stop straightening my hair in the real world,” Dan wheedled, “will you stop dyeing yours? Like a pact?”

Phil shook his head in absolute flat denial. “No. No way. And you’ll never stop straightening your hair, anyway. You hate your hobbit hair too much, even if I love it.” Phil tousled Dan’s hair playfully.

“And I love your hair brown like this,” Dan said, his voice softer now as he toyed with some strands of Phil’s hair. “I mean, I love how you look with black hair. I think I’d love how you look with any color hair. Heck, dye it green if you want! But … if we’re talking about loving each other how we really are, without any masks, then that would mean me letting my hair be naturally curly and you letting your hair be naturally brown.” His smile looked more hopeful than devious now.

Phil sighed. “I’ll let my hair be naturally brown here in our dreams, if it’s really important to you, and if you agree to let your hair be naturally curly here, too … but we don’t have to show all the absolute truth to the rest of the world. It’s different here. Here … this is just for us.”

Dan nodded, satisfied for the moment, and pushed both hands into Phil’s pale brown hair, twining his fingers between the strands so that he cradled Phil’s head in his hands, and pulled him into the softest of kisses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All that remains of this story is a short chapter, a sort of epilogue, to wrap up the tour, and I hope to have that posted within a week or so.


	11. The End!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Amazing Tour Is Not On Fire comes to an end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the final chapter! The exclamation point at the end of this chapter’s title is a reference to the last screen image of the TATINOF stage show.

Phil sat on the sofa in his usual spot, leaving Dan his preferred sofa crease, though he guessed that Dan would more likely choose to sit closer beside Phil instead. Phil had made the mistake of taking apart the Tetris lamp near the fireplace, and he hadn’t been able to figure out how to put it back together. He kept moving the pieces from one hand to the other, trying to fit them together with little success.

Dan came from the kitchen holding two mugs and presented one to Phil then, as Phil had hoped, curled up close to him so that his legs lay partway on top of Phil’s and their sides pressed together. Phil took a sip from the mug of hot chocolate and sighed, a sound Dan echoed as he lay his head on Phil’s shoulder.

“It’s going to be hard to drink your cocoa like that,” Phil pointed out, then took another sip, letting the warmth of the chocolate, the warmth of the man beside him, the warmth of this shared home they’d built together over the years seep into his bones, leaving him deeply comfortable and relaxed.

“I’ll drink it in a minute,” Dan replied. “Right now I’m comfy.” He nuzzled his head in the crook of Phil’s shoulder, his wavy hair tickling Phil’s chin and neck. He held his warm mug carefully in both hands, resting it on his thigh as he inhaled deeply.

Phil chuckled. “Are you sniffing me?”

“You smell like chocolate,” Dan replied before kissing Phil’s neck lightly and sitting up to take a sip of his own warm drink.

Phil rolled his eyes. “You’re the one who gave me the chocolate, you know.”

Dan shook his head, drank deeply from his mug, and smiled with his eyes closed for a moment. He opened his eyes and looked at Phil, and Phil saw the same complete relaxation and comfort suffusing him as Phil had been feeling. “You always smell like chocolate,” Dan smiled. “Or Haribo.”

“Always?” Phil asked, raising an eyebrow. “Even after we’ve spent hours getting all sweaty and coming all over each other and…”

A siren wailed from the road outside, drowning out Phil’s words, and they looked at each other and laughed.

“Just when you were starting to get so very wonderfully … inappropriate.” Dan’s grin was wicked. “Tell me more about the coming…”

The sound of drilling set Phil’s brain vibrating horribly in his skull, and he grimaced. “Did you have to make it this realistic?” he whined. “The chocolate was good, and the sofa, and even the Tetris lamp, even though I sort of broke it…”

Dan sighed. “Well, at least you only broke it in our dream. The real one is safe at home.” Their eyes met and they both looked a little sad. “Thousands of miles away.” Dan climbed onto Phil’s lap, wrapping his arms and legs around him as the sofa and lounge and Tetris lamp dissolved around them, leaving them cushioned by the plump pillows in their treehouse.

Their home away from home.

It wasn’t the same.

Dan squeezed Phil with all his limbs and then pushed him over so that he lay flat on the cushions with Dan on top of him. The roof and branches over their heads melted away so that beyond Dan’s head Phil saw a sky filled with stars. He remembered the first time Dan had been a sky full of stars, and then that star-filled boy leaned down, ducking his head to kiss him.

“You still taste like chocolate,” Dan breathed wistfully against Phil’s lips.

“You taste like starlight,” Phil replied, remembering, melancholy. “Like a man with lips made of stars.”

Dan lifted his hands to hold Phil’s face gently and leaned down to kiss him again. “You taste like home.”

* * *

Phil woke to the sound of the tour bus tires on the road, the sight of light glancing through the curtains to dance on the bedroom wall.

He almost missed the drilling and the sirens. Before they’d even left for the American part of the tour, they’d already agreed to find a new place when they got home, but right now all he wanted was to be back in that creaky flat with the dodgy gas pipes and complete lack of storage.

He imagined himself sleeping in Dan’s bed with the black-and-white comforter. He could bring his own pillow, with its bright blues and greens, the same pillow his head rested on right now. He turned his head slightly so that he could see mostly only the colorful fabric of his pillow case, and he imagined that he was in Dan’s bed back at the flat. He could smell Dan all around him in this room, could feel his warmth only inches away, could hear his soft breathing as he continued sleeping. He would wake soon, and the tour bus would arrive back in California again, and they would start another day of the tour.

Just two more performances.

Two more shows, on two consecutive days in California, and they would be finished. They would have to wrap up some loose ends for the behind-the-scenes documentary for YouTube Red, but then they could go home.

Finally home.  **Their**  home. Their home in a different sense than it had been when they left it, because they would be sharing it in a very different way than they had before.

He opened his eyes and looked at Dan’s peaceful, sleeping face. No frown, no dimple, no ironically pretentious facial expression. Just … Dan. And then those brown eyes fluttered open, and Dan smiled a sleepy smile, and there was the dimple. The deep one. With him lying on his side, the other wasn’t visible, but Phil knew it was there. He knew Dan now. Not just his dimples—he’d known those before, even anonymous people on the Internet who had never met Dan knew those—but Dan’s heart and Dan’s soul. Dan in the daylight and Dan in his dreams. He knew all of Dan. And Dan knew all of him.

And Dan loved him, even knowing it all.

And he loved Dan.

And tonight at the show they would have to act like nothing had changed. That they were the same Dan and Phil they’d been when they left that creaky flat, that they were the same people they’d been to each other then. That they hadn’t discovered everything they’d discovered since. That they didn’t know each other more intimately than any two people possibly could.

They would have to act like friends … with the tiniest bit of flirtation originally written into the script, which now felt like it profaned the profound honesty of the truth.

Dan’s drowsy smile faded, presumably at the expression on Phil’s own face. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Phil shrugged, then turned to lie on his back, looking up at the familiar ceiling of the familiar tour bus bedroom. “Just … I’m tired of putting on an act. Pretending that you aren’t … that you aren’t …  **everything**. To me.”

Dan’s voice sounded sad when he said slowly, “We’ll still have to pretend when we get home. I mean … unless you were thinking … were you wanting to tell everyone?”

Phil turned to face Dan again. “No!” he said forcefully. “This is too important, too private, too … this is just for us. No one else would understand.” He kissed Dan’s lips gently. “No one  **could**  understand. Even people who know some of it, like Martyn and Cornelia … they can’t really understand. No one ever will. This is  **ours**.”

“Then … how will it be different when we’re home?” Dan sounded confused.

Phil sighed and lay flat on his back again. “I don’t know. We just won’t have to … every night won’t be … we can just … we can be together, at the flat. Whatever flat we end up choosing. We can be there together, and it can be private. It can be  **real**. When we’re there, when no one is watching, it will be real. And that will be most of the time. Right now, it’s just … it’s like … most of it’s pretending … and we’re only real in stolen moments. I want more than that. I don’t want to have to spend most of our time pretending that we aren’t …  **connected**.”

Phil felt Dan lie flat beside him, both of them staring up at the ceiling now, and then he felt that warm, beloved hand slip into his, fingers intertwining. Dan said softly, “We’ll be able to be real. All the time. Not just in our dreams.”

Phil turned his head, so did Dan, and they just looked at each other for a while. Maybe all the rest of the way to California.

* * *

The penultimate show in some random southern California town went off without a hitch, and all that remained was the most important show, the one that they were filming in Hollywood to release as an actual movie on YouTube Red … a movie that was planned to be one of the subscription service’s first major releases.

No pressure.

In the dressing room before the show, Dan shooed everyone out and pushed Phil up against the door to kiss him, using the weight of both their bodies to make sure no one could open the door to interrupt.

“Okay,” he said as he pulled away, looking a bit nervous. Phil knew how he felt. They’d done a lot of these shows, but this one would be recorded forever, seen by a lot more people than any of the live stage shows had been. They would have to be aware of every glance, every facial expression, every gesture. “You ready?” Dan asked, and Phil nodded.

“One more kiss,” Phil begged, and Dan complied with flattering enthusiasm. There wouldn’t be any kissing once their make-up had been applied and the crew began buzzing around them like a cloud of annoyingly persistent but incredibly helpful gnats, right up until the moment they walked out onto the stage alone … together.

* * *

Phil thought that final show was the best of the entire tour. They’d certainly practiced it enough by then, after so many performances in so many cities in front of so many crowds. And if their facial expressions showed a bit too much occasionally, well … the fans would only like it more.

But how could they sing, “Without the Internet we never would have met,” in the same way now that they had when they’d first written the song all those months ago? Before they’d known.

Before they’d known that they had met long, long before Phil ever made that first video, before YouTube even existed, or Twitter, or any of it.

They hadn’t needed the Internet in order to meet. They’d only needed their dreams.

Though, in the end, the Internet  **had**  ended up helping rather a lot with the practical side of things.

But none of that was in the show they’d written, or the song they sang, though a bit of it may have been in their eyes despite how much they tried to hide it.

* * *

They’d filmed much of the documentary commentary already, but the last segment had them both struggling for composure. Phil was surprised how emotional he was that it was really over. It was really the end. The end of the tour, but the start of something new for him and Dan, and neither of them knew yet what that would look like.

Phil suspected there would be toast and tea and anime and treehouses and cornflowers and giant Godzillas and things he couldn’t even imagine yet, because their future could be anything they wanted it to be, anything at all.

As they filmed the final scenes for the documentary, he and Dan tried to wrap things up, talking about the end of the tour. They’d written vague notes in advance, but hadn’t planned precisely what they wanted to say, because they liked to leave things a bit spontaneous, as they did in their videos. Some of their conversation was completely unscripted.

So when they’d climbed into the car and Phil said without thinking, “I think I’ll be on the plane and I’ll be like, ‘Awww! I miss the tour bus!’” he saw Dan’s expression shift, as if he were trying to keep his face bland in front of the camera, but up close Phil could see that his eyes were not bland at all. Not at all.

“ **Will**  you miss the tour bus?” Dan asked, trying to turn it into a joke. But Phil knew it wasn’t a joke.

“Yeah!” And he made sure Dan could see he meant it. Because without that bus, without them sharing that bed, would they ever have worked it out? Would they ever have realized?

They made sure that the edit cut immediately after that, because Dan hadn’t been able to keep his expression from going too soft for public consumption. Too many feelings and memories that just weren’t meant for YouTube Red.

The final words of the documentary, though, they’d scripted precisely in advance. Phil knew the cute bit of dialogue would work, would wrap up the story of the tour, would give their viewers a sense of satisfaction and completion … but they’d also made sure to include a bit of their own private meaning, just for them.

Because, in the end, this voyage had been about them. About them finding each other, and realizing that they’d found each other long ago without even realizing it, and discovering that their home had been there for them all along, but now they could go back to having it mostly just for themselves. They had a lot to explore and learn, now that they would finally have a bit more privacy.

“Hey Phil?” Dan asked, following the script.

“What?” Phil asked brightly.

“Let’s go home.”

“Okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there you have it, folks. The end has come. I’ve loved writing this story, and some of you have seemed to really enjoy reading it, so I’m kind of sorry to see it end. But let me know what you think, whether it be through kudos, comments, recommendations on Tumblr, or whatever floats your boat. Every single one of you who has offered even the smallest word of encouragement, thank you. Your support has been appreciated more than you know.
> 
> A reviewer here on AO3 requested this fic from Dan’s POV, and that sounded like a really interesting idea, so I actually do plan to write a one-shot that gives Dan’s perspective on this world and its events. It won’t be an additional chapter to this story, because this story is finished, but I’ll link to it somehow as a sort of adjunct or something if/when it gets written.
> 
> And, lastly, to the Tumblr anon who many many months ago requested that I write a soulmates AU, this strange concoction probably wasn’t what you were hoping for, but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless. :)

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I can also be found on Tumblr at [@adorkablephil](http://adorkablephil.tumblr.com/) and Twitter at [@stilladorkable](https://twitter.com/stilladorkable). Feel free to stop by any time to say hi!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Flower Boy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16376222) by [adorkablephil (kimberly_a)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimberly_a/pseuds/adorkablephil)




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